After Death, page 18
“The seven-foot wrestler, tattoo of a snake comin’ out his belly button.”
“I’m talkin’ the first Goliath. Check it out, man. He was ten feet tall.”
As they slosh through the party debris where once commerce was conducted and busy workers supported families by supplying something real and nourishing, Kuba says, “This Goliath, he live in a castle between the tree of knowledge and the tree of salt?”
Speedo Hickam is waiting for them just outside the front door. In his long black raincoat and hood, he reminds Aleem of a nun, too soft to endure hard weather like a man. “We found somethin’.”
“What somethin’?”
“You gotta see. Over at Whole Fruit.”
As the three head toward the largest building in the complex, Kuba says, “Another thing, with all respect, nobody ever been ten feet tall.”
Aleem says, “Speedo, you know about Goliath?”
“He a wrestler, bites the heads off baby chicks?”
“That’s him,” Kuba confirms.
“Ain’t real chicks,” Speedo says. “They’s marshmallow chicks like them at Easter.”
“Real as real can be,” Kuba insists.
“You want to think so, that’s cool with me,” Speedo says.
“Grandma Verna she say the way it happened, this shrimp David figures he can jack up Goliath, bring him down. Goliath he picks up little Davey, loads him in a fuckin’ big slingshot, and splatters him all over the side of the temple.”
“What temple?” Speedo asks.
“Don’t matter what temple. Important thing is David been taught a moral lesson.”
At Whole Fruit, Jason, Hakeem, and Carlisle are waiting just outside the big opening that once was filled by a roll-up door. When Jason directs his light at what they found beyond the threshold, Kuba declares, “No tooth fairy left it. Bitch is here somewhere.”
Aleem can almost feel her head in his hands, his thumbs pressing through the warm jelly of her eyes.
LUCKY
The darkness is so thick that it seems to have substance. Nina feels it pressing on her, coiling in her ears. The air is oily with this darkness, as though it leaves a residue in her lungs when she exhales.
Now and then, she thinks she hears voices, ordered packets of sound different from the wind howl and rain chatter that is muffled by the walls of the packing plant. These moments of suspected human presence do not seem to issue from within this building. They’re as brief as they are faint, like voices from some nameless Beyond that you might expect to hear at a séance. Time passes without the storeroom door being thrown open.
John is afflicted with allergies, and the environment here challenges his determination to be silent. The poor kid stifles a sneeze and minutes later another, perhaps clamping his hands over his face or pinching his nose—God forbid that it happens if one of Aleem’s homeys does step into the room—and both times he whispers, “Sorry,” and she whispers, “It’s okay.”
Maybe ten minutes pass, and he makes a furtive sound, which must have been his hand digging in a coat pocket, because then he blows his nose discreetly. Following a silence without an apology, he reveals a problem in a voice so soft that she strains to hear him.
“Oh no. It’s gone.”
She whispers, “What?”
He barely breathes his reply: “The lucky hundred.”
For a moment, his words don’t compute for her, but then she remembers. In the kitchen. Before they fled their home. He pulled one bill from a bundle, examining it with wonder. It’s real. He tucked the banded hundreds into interior pockets of his jacket, but he folded the loose hundred into an exterior pocket. It’s like a lucky penny ten thousand times over. Maybe the same pocket where he had kept folded Kleenex. Now it must be in the water around them.
“Forget it,” she whispers. “We have so much more.”
After a freighted silence, he says, “Maybe I didn’t lose it here.”
He’d first blown his nose when they stepped into the building, just inside the threshold.
“The wind will have carried it away,” she assures him.
“Maybe not.”
“The wind will have taken it,” she insists.
THE BITTER BITE
He takes the turn at considerable speed, the heavy Bentley pressing to the pavement as though it possesses a gravity greater than that attendant to all other things on Earth. In the sudden turning, its bright beams slap across the trunks and lower branches of the leafless grove ranked on the elevated land. The trees twitch as if physically struck and shuddered by the light, and then fall away into darkness as the headlamps align with the slick blacktop straightaway on which glittering raindrops dance like spilled diamonds.
Michael’s shadow self lives in the nanotech that webs every cell in his body, and those skeins are woven into the spectrum of data-bearing electromagnetic waves that is the worldwide web of the internet and all the computers connected to it. As the car slows with the barren orchard on both sides, a stylized and luminous compass appears in the upper-right quadrant of his vision. This signal seeker leads him not by indicating magnetic north, but by pointing toward the transponder in Nina’s smartphone.
He pulls onto the shoulder of the road and puts the sedan in park and switches off the lights and wipers. He shrugs into the thigh-length Helly Hansen rain jacket that belonged to someone at the house in which he’d meant to spend a few days, a respite upended by the mad-dog gangbanger, Aleem. Zippered pockets accommodate the three spare magazines for the rifle as well as a box cutter that he found in a desk drawer in the Corona del Mar residence. He pulls up the hood and secures it under his chin with the Velcro strap. When he checks the mirrors, the road behind him, to the north, is dark and at the moment untraveled. He kills the engine, retrieves the AR-15, and gets out into the storm.
The door is open, and he is behind it. When he looks over the top to be sure no traffic is coming from the south, he sees someone approaching, forty or fifty feet away. The guy is tall, wearing a full-length black raincoat with a deep hood concealing his face. He’s a medieval figure, like a mendicant monk on a pilgrimage to ancient Rome, who has crossed half a world and a thousand years from one step to the next. He isn’t on the shoulder of the highway, but he walks in the middle of the southbound lane. He calls out, “Need help there, mister? She break down on you?”
It isn’t his shadow self’s high-tech analytic capability that warns Michael of danger. It is the profound intuition with which he was born, an unshakable recognition of evil. This stranger is not a generous Samaritan venturing into foul weather and darkness with the hope of doing a kindness for someone. Nevertheless, Michael isn’t capable of opening fire on the man without being certain of his intentions. Besides, the crack of the rifle will carry far even through the cry of wind and sizzle of rain, announcing his presence to others of Nina’s pursuers sooner than is ideal. He raises his voice above the storm, and by his words he asserts both that he knows what’s happening here and that he has been called to assist. “I’m looking for Aleem.”
The apparition halts twenty feet away. Still no face can be discerned in the hood, not even the slightest trace of eyeshine. “What’s an Aleem?”
There’s no curiosity in the question, as ought to be the case if this is an average citizen, but only a cold note of challenge, which pretty much identifies the man as one of the gangster’s crew.
As he responds, Michael reaches back into the car, feels for the added kill switch on the steering column, finds it, and flicks it, activating the GPS and navigation system. “I was told Aleem needs transportation. Here I am.”
“Told how?”
“He phoned Brett Bucklin, and Brett phoned me. I live in the area. You know Brett Bucklin, Aleem’s attorney?”
“How Aleem phone you?”
The longer Michael stands behind the open car door, the more it appears he’s using it for protection, and the less it seems that he is who he claims to be. He can’t go forth with the AR-15 in hand and assume the response will be judicious. The stranger hasn’t seen the rifle and might take it as a threat no matter how casually it’s carried. Michael props the weapon against the open door, butt plate on the pavement, and steps into the southbound lane. “No, he didn’t phone me, he phoned Brett Bucklin, his attorney in the city.”
“All our phones went to shit.”
“Evidently not Aleem’s.”
“Wind is shoutin’ you down, man.”
Michael raises his voice. “Aleem’s phone didn’t go to shit.”
Rain blows under Michael’s hood, and he blinks it out of his eyes. The gangbanger might be holding something in his right hand. Michael can’t quite be sure. The darkness and weather are aids to deception.
“So you sayin’ Aleem called Bucklin.”
“That’s right.”
“Then Bucklin he phones you.”
“Like I said. Can we get this done? This weather sucks.”
“You here for transportation, take us where?”
“Wherever you all need to go.”
“Say what?”
Michael raises his voice again. “Wherever you want to go.”
“Eight plus you in one car.”
Michael tries to let the wind outspeak him without making it obvious that he’s doing so. “An associate of mine is on his way in an Escalade. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Louder, man. Who will what?”
“I can’t outshout the damn storm,” Michael says and moves toward the man. They’re only five or six steps apart. “My name’s Easton Ellis. Who’re you?”
“Masud. Why Aleem call a lawyer ’stead of another homey?”
“None of your homeys live here in Shitkicker Valley,” Michael says, going online as he speaks, entering the navigation service’s system, sliding down the transponder signal into the Bentley, taking over its electronic controls.
The car alarm shrieks and the headlights flash, startling Masud, who brings up the pistol in his hand, aiming at the sedan. He might not be one of Aleem’s more intellectual thugs, but he’ll only need three seconds to realize that if someone in the Bentley poses a threat, then so does the man who was driving it.
Michael needs less than two seconds to thumb the razor lock on the box cutter concealed in his right hand and slash the wrist that Masud exposes when the raincoat sleeve slides back from his extended gun arm. A thin razor cut is instant hot-wire pain, worse than a knife slash, a shock to the system. The pistol clatters to the blacktop.
As the car goes dark and silent, Michael body-slams the wounded man. Masud goes down in a billow and rustle of raincoat, rapping the back of his head hard on the pavement, and Michael falls atop him, pinning him to the road. The dreaded moment is upon him, the mortal task he has the training to fulfill but for which the necessity has never before arisen and certainly never the desire. At a distance of mere inches, he at last sees the face within the cowl, a countenance as human featured as his own, eyes briefly clouded by concussion. Masud is a monster, one of eight who must not reach Nina and John before Michael can spirit mother and son away. Cruelty, brutality, and murder are essential to these men’s business model, and there’s no way to thwart them but the hard way. He plucks Masud’s dropped pistol from the pavement, grips it by the barrel, raises it above his head. Masud’s eyes clarify, and Michael hesitates, and Masud’s frozen features distort with hatred. Michael hammers the butt of the pistol into a sudden snarl and glare of homicidal fury, hammers it again and again and yet again, until the struggling man goes slack under him.
The highway is little traveled at this hour, in this weather, but there has been no Armageddon that made the world a graveyard. Someone is likely to come along at any moment.
Michael gets to his feet and tosses the gun into the drainage channel, where it vanishes under the rush of muddy water. He grips the dead man by the ankles and drags him off the blacktop, onto the shoulder of the highway, and rolls him into the same ditch. Although the current is swift and the runoff is deep enough to cover Masud, the corpse is not borne away. Animated by trapped air, a portion of the black raincoat swells above the turbulent surface of the runoff, shuddering and strange, as though a vengeful spirit strains to free itself from the body in which it can no longer enjoy life.
Badly shaken by what he’s done, Michael looks at the tortured shapes of the apple trees, which stand in cryptic testament to the history of humanity. He remembers Nina telling him this valley is as near to Eden as anywhere she’s ever seen; that was when the orchard was productive. Knowledge is transformative and elevating, but it isn’t a reliably sweet fruit. They say that, from the first Eden, innocents came naked into the outer dark with the bitter knowledge of lost immortality and a grim recognition of a new life measured in meager years that quicken to the grave; worse, they soon learned that although they must submit to death, they could also subject others to it on as little as a whim, and for some that became a pleasure. Michael takes no pleasure in it, and he hopes that he won’t have to kill anyone else. His duty to Nina and John, however, will require him to do what must be done. Killing and murder are different things, and killing evil men to prevent them from murdering others is not wicked work. Just the same, he’d rather not be burdened by such memories as the sound of flesh splitting and facial bones shattering under the hammering butt of a pistol.
He returns to the Bentley and retrieves the AR-15 and closes the driver’s door. He hurries south, looking for an entrance to the orchard that bridges the flooded drainage ditch.
UNNERVED BY MEMORIES
One end of the sodden hundred-dollar bill floats in the rippled surface of the packing-house flood, and the other end is pasted to the concrete threshold over which the murky water laps and recedes. The wise, sad eyes of Benjamin Franklin gaze up into the light with which Jason reveals this evidence, which is more than a clue but less than proof that Nina and the boy might be sheltering in this place. The bill is neither filthy nor half rotted away, but clean and whole, as though it must have been dropped here minutes earlier.
Soaked and chilled and muddied, denied the comfort of the SUV and the convenience of a phone, mocked with “Macarena,” foiled and humiliated by a woman who seems to have the power of a true witch, Aleem is in a homicidal mood. His fury is so great that he dares not show it. A man of his position can’t afford for his crew to see him ruled by emotion. At all times, he must be perceived as in iron control of himself, dispassionate and obdurate in his pursuit of his goals. An excessively emotional man—even if the emotion is furious anger expressed with vicious cruelty—is thought to be a weak man, one who will be relentlessly plotted against by his underlings. When he finds Nina, he’ll kill her quickly, lest the delight of seeing her torn by pain becomes too much to contain. To compensate for abstaining from the pleasure of torturing her, he’ll destroy her spirit. He’ll cast her into despair by shooting John twice in the face, in front of her, before blowing her brains out, thus killing her twice, and he will do so with apparent indifference.
Puzzled by Aleem’s silence and his continued focus on the hundred-dollar bill, Jason says, “You with me here?”
“Speedo,” Aleem says. “Go back and find your phone, see does it work now. It don’t, then hike into town, call Modeen and Lincoln.”
Speedo is a tough little bastard, but he’s the smallest among the crew, the least useful in this action. Besides, of them all, he’s the one who can most easily pass for a church boy whose only gang is God and all His angels. Girls think he’s sweet and funny. Old ladies look at him and figure he spends his time delivering meals to shut-ins. Most men seem to view him as an earnest young hustler who probably delivers newspapers before school, mows lawns in the late afternoon, and works at the car wash on Saturdays.
“Remember,” Aleem says, “they bring plastic drop cloths and strappin’ tape, so we can wrap two burritos for Hector Salazar.”
Speedo is amused. “Give Hector some takeout for his afternoon at sea. I’m on my way, bro.”
Through all of that, the wet currency at their feet has held Aleem rapt, so that Jason says, “We goin’ in?”
“Gimme a minute,” Aleem says. “I’m thinkin’ out a strategy.”
That’s a lie. The events in the orchard have left the first-ever hairline crack in Aleem’s self-confidence. The hundred-dollar bill seems to be an omen, like the painting of the wolf in The Portent, which should have been a movie with sequels, except they killed off the entire cast and left nowhere to go with the story. After he saw that flick, he wondered if there might be truth in the concept of karma, if maybe the shit you did to others would sooner or later be done to you. The thought had bothered him for a day, maybe two, before he got over it. But now the hundred-dollar bill has brought back memories and spooked him.
When Aleem was seventeen, eighteen, the gang was led by Tatum Krait, whom nobody ever called Tatum, whom everyone called Mamba or sometimes Doctor Mamba, everyone but his father, Walter Krait, who despised him and called him Tumtum. Then a real mamba bit Walter, who died. After the results of the autopsy were revealed, the medical examiner declared the cause of death a rattlesnake bite because, for one thing, mambas weren’t native to Southern California and, for another thing, he understood that was what he needed to declare to ensure that nothing terrible would happen to his eleven-year-old daughter. Mamba saw Aleem as a young man of promise and groomed him for a leadership position, first by secretly assigning him the job as the axe in the human resources department. Sometimes a swing man gets greedy and too often steps on a shipment, cutting it too hard with baby laxative, until it’s bunk. Or an authorized dealer finds his own source and underreports sales. Or a mule is seen on a pier, pretending to fish side by side with a known DEA agent. Termination must ensue. So young Aleem cultivates an image as a party animal and get-along guy. No one he asks to a one-on-one meeting suspects where it will lead. When they are alone, he opens a bottle of whatever he knows his target prefers and pours and says he is speaking for Mamba, who wants to express his gratitude for work well done. With a second round, sometimes a third, Aleem is laying on the praise, swapping stories, sharing some laughs. When the mood is high, he produces three plastic-wrapped bricks of Benjamins, the thank-you from Mamba, thirty thousand. The doomed know full well what they’ve done, but they believe they’ve gotten away with it, always bask in the praise, and take the bonus with delight, Ben Franklin regarding them with his wise and sad eyes from every bundle of cash. On the way out of the room, Aleem puts his arm around his guest, telling him how valued he is, which is when he slams the stiletto between two ribs and into the heart. It’s part of his job, by himself, to get the body into a van, which he can do because he’s strong and has the right equipment, including a hydraulic hand truck. He drives the van to the funeral home with which Mamba maintains an arrangement. A cremation occurs. In the three years he’s the axe, he resolves seven such problems and begins his ascendancy.
