City of the Lost (5 page)
Authors: Stephen Blackmoore
The showers aren’t the worst. I stagger through a locker room, metal doors ripped from their hinges. A maze of corridors that zig one way, zag another. Windows boarded over and covered with graffiti. Empty doorways leading to rooms gutted and torched years ago.
Time stretches away from me in a haze. I wander the halls looking for an exit like I’m walking through mud. I’m reaching for something in the back of my mind, but it keeps sliding away like it’s on ice.
I need to get out of here. Until I know what the hell’s actually happened to me I need to get away from Giavetti. Regroup. Come up with a plan. Get my head together. Maybe literally.
I hang onto that thought. It keeps me going. But somewhere along that dark walk, stumbling over broken furniture and shattered thoughts it comes to me.
I can’t leave. Not yet.
My thinking’s still muddy, but the brain fog’s lifting. Takes a while to rebuild a brain, I suppose. As it does, I find myself thinking more and more about what this all means.
If I’ve got this right, I can’t die. Well, I can’t be gotten rid of, at least. I’m like fucking Superman. Go ahead, put a bullet in my brain. Like I goddamn care.
That’s kind of cool. But the more my brain comes back online the more it doesn’t sound so great.
What happens a hundred years from now? Two hundred? What happens when I’m exactly like this and everything I’ve ever known is so far away I can barely remember it?
Jesus. Twenty years is a long time. Can I handle two hundred years of not dying? Yeah, probably. I mean, it’s not a stretch to think I can just keep plodding along, right? Easier to imagine being here tomorrow than not being here at all.
But something’s eating at me. Takes a few minutes to figure out what it is.
Choice. The bastard’s taken it away from me. It’s not that I necessarily want to go back to what I was. Hell, I just got here. Who knows what this is going to lead to. I might like it, I might not. It’s not that I don’t want immortality, it’s that I want to choose.
The stone’s the key to all this. Giavetti couldn’t have done this to me without it. Maybe it can reverse it, maybe not. And as long as Giavetti’s got it he’s got something to hold over me.
I hit a staircase littered with burned-out bed frames and rotting mattresses. I pick my way past the debris, feet crunching on shattered crack pipes, empty beer cans.
The smell hits me halfway up. Rot from the next floor. Meat gone far past bad. A lot of it.
When I get to the top I see why.
Bodies. Half a dozen. Maybe more. Bloated, oozing from splits in the skin. Meat falling off bones. They look weeks old, but I know at least one of them isn’t. I can see Julio’s dragon tattoos stretched across his back, open sores and maggots swarming around it where the skin has torn. I wonder if his wife is in there, too.
The corpses are piled against the corridor walls, facedown on the floor. I wonder who all those people are and if they’re all really dead.
And whether Giavetti even knows what the fuck he’s doing.
Whispers. A dim light in a room at the end the hallway. Though I’m far off I can see silhouettes. I can pick the voices out as easily as though they were right next to me.
Giavetti. And Simon. Simon, who should be in San Diego.
“We had ourselves a deal,” Simon says. “Both of us. I help you get the rock, you do both of us.”
“The deal changed,” Giavetti says, “the minute you turned on me.”
“Goddammit, I didn’t do it. I told you that. They saw an opportunity, and they took it.”
“Yeah, and who told them about that opportunity? Huh? This was supposed to be kept quiet. All I needed were some men to get the goddamn rock. Men that don’t ask questions. I was stupid enough to believe you then. Not this time.”
The weight of Simon’s betrayal slams into me, and for a moment all I can do is listen, stunned. He knew about all this. Knew where Giavetti was hiding out. Knew what he could do. Would do.
And he threw me to the fucking shark anyway.
I press against the wall, inch my way toward them. Orange shadows flicker around me. Why didn’t I see it before? Of course Simon would know. He doesn’t make a deal without crawling through every angle. He’s had this planned from the start. Let Giavetti take the heat then take the stone for himself.
But it all went to shit, didn’t it? Simon provided the talent, but they were working for him. And when they tried to snag the stone, Giavetti took them out. Left Julio and me to bat cleanup.
“You know it wasn’t like that.” Simon’s voice growing higher, getting frantic. I’ve never heard him like this. He sounds worse than on the phone when Julio died.
“Right. And that fucking gorilla you sent over the other night? Well, I took care of him, too.”
“Jesus. You didn’t . . . you didn’t have to turn him into a goddamn zombie.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Between him and your other goon I got things figured out just fine, now.”
Silence.
Voice barely a whisper. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s talking about me, Simon,” I say, stepping into the room.
Giavetti, Beretta in hand. Simon, watching the gun like a mongoose eyeing a cobra.
“Joseph?”
“I guess we know why you wanted that stone so much, huh? That why you’re here, Simon? That why you fucked me? Why you fucked Julio? To get your goddamn stone?”
Giavetti lets out a laugh. “Oh, I want to see you talk your way out of this one. On the inside, I’m crying. Really.”
“I . . . I was worried. Wanted to make sure—”
I backhand him to the floor, his nose crunching against my knuckles. “You knew about this. The whole fucking time you knew about it. What he was doing. What he could do to us.”
“Of course he knew,” Giavetti says. “Immortality, son. How do you pass that up?”
“No. I—” Simon’s voice trails off as he struggles for air, for something to say. Blood’s gushing out of his shattered nose. I grab him by the lapels, lift him above me. He’s blubbering, eyes wide. The mongoose just got bit.
I throw him against the wall. Hear something crack. He hits the ground hard, struggles to pull himself up.
“I didn’t . . . didn’t know,” Simon insists. His swollen nose is going purple.
“Don’t fucking tell me that,” I say. “Tell Julio. Tell his wife.” I reach for him, not sure what I’m going to do, knowing it will be final whatever it is.
Giavetti’s gunshot makes the decision for me. The bullet punches through Simon’s chest, blooming red on his shirt.
Simon scrabbles at the wound, pitches onto his back.
We watch him bleed out. Neither of us makes a move to help him. I’m only sorry I wasn’t the one to pull the trigger.
Giavetti and I stare at each other for a long moment, sizing each other up. Hard to tell from the look on his face, but I don’t think he’s liking his odds much.
“Guess that just leaves us,” Giavetti says. He pulls a pack of cigarettes from a pocket, shakes one loose, and tosses the pack to me.
“Go on,” he says. “Not like they’re going to kill you.” He lights up with a Zippo, tosses it to me.
I light up a smoke for myself, take a long drag. Suck down almost half of the thing before I think to take a breath.
Giavetti pulls the opal out of his pocket. Rolls it between knobby fingers. “Got a proposition for you.”
“I’m all ears.”
“How would you like your life back?”
I stare at him as it sinks in. So he can do it. Or he’s just blowing smoke up my ass. I’m leaning toward the smoke theory. But it’s a good question. How would I like my life back? Living, I understand. Being dead’s going to take some getting used to. But there are some benefits. I work my jaw, feeling tendon and bone, good as new.
But there’s that empty feeling, like I’ve been ripped open and hollowed out. I’m Pinocchio in reverse. The real boy turned into a wooden puppet.
And what if I take him up on his offer? Julio’s gone. Simon’s gone. Like it or not, nothing’s going to be the same.
“What’s the catch?” I say. “What do you get out of it?”
“You out of my hair. I bring you back and you go home. Like nothing ever happened.”
Yeah, and if you order now you get this handsome Pocket Fisherman. So what if he can do it? What makes me think he will? No. He’d just bring me back and shoot me in the head again. Game over.
“Living forever isn’t for lightweights, kid. Something tells me you’re not cut out for it. I’m the only one knows how to bring you back. I’m the only one with the answers.”
Maybe he’s right. Maybe I’m not cut out for it. But I’m not cut out for dying, either.
I glance at Simon’s body, dark blood pooling underneath him. He might have screwed me, but he wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for Giavetti. “Not sure I trust you much.”
He shrugs. “What, and you could trust him? I’m not the one tossed you at me. He was using you as bait, and you know it. So, what’ll it be? You want your life back? Then take me up on the deal. You want answers? Only way you’re going to get them.”
“If you could actually kill me,” I say, “you’d have done it already.” I take a step toward him. I am so gonna kick his ass.
He raises the gun, like it’s going to do any good. “You don’t want to do that, kid,” he says.
“He’s right, Sunday.” A familiar voice behind me. “You don’t want to do that.”
Frank Tanaka steps into the light behind me, gun out and wavering between me and Giavetti. The cavalry’s here. Too early or too late, I’m not sure which.
“Well, fuck me,” Giavetti says and starts to empty the clip.
Bullets pepper the wall behind us. A round hits me in the chest, another blows out the back of my knee. I go down, my leg buckling under my own weight. I yell at Frank not to fire, but too many years of police work kick in and he takes his shot.
Giavetti’s head snaps back with a well placed round. A look, not of rage or fear, just resignation. Like this is just a temporary setback. He wobbles, topples to the floor.
I drag myself to him, try to think of something, anything to help. It’s useless.
He’s gone.
Chapter 6“Fuck. Fuck me.”
Frank runs over, shoves me out of the way. Something wild in his eyes I’ve never seen before.
Frank runs over, shoves me out of the way. Something wild in his eyes I’ve never seen before.
He pounds on Giavetti’s chest. Starts giving him CPR, like that’s going to do any good. The man’s missing the entire rear of his skull. Frank’s breath just blows out the back.
That’s when the stone catches my eye. Under a piece of trash where it skittered when it fell from Giavetti’s hand. While Frank’s occupied, I snake my hand out and palm it.
There’s a surge that runs up my arm like I’ve hit my funny bone with a sledgehammer. A flare in my vision that swallows everything in a blinding haze of colors. A rush of sound, rising to a deafening pitch. A dazzling light and sound show, patterns shifting, growing, collapsing in on themselves. It goes on forever.
Until it doesn’t, leaving behind an abrupt emptiness in my mind. Takes me a moment to come back to myself, realizing that it lasted no time at all. The scene around me hasn’t changed.
Frank’s muttering to himself, like he’s just shot his own dog. Finally he slams his fists on Giavetti’s chest and pushes himself away.
“Goddammit.” It takes him a second before he seems to notice that I’m still there. And bleeding. “You’re hit. I’ll—” The slurping sound of my knee regrowing, the gaping hole in my chest collapsing in on itself stops him mid-sentence.
He’s sketchy. Can’t really blame him, I suppose. But when the bullet in my chest hasn’t even finished popping out, he loses his shit and puts another one right back in.
“Jesus, man. Do you mind?” My ears are ringing. He’s taken out my left lung, and my voice is a wheezy gasp. I’m really going to have to burn these clothes.
I pull myself up from the floor, the new knee still unsteady. At that range the hole’s big enough to shove a grapefruit through. I don’t want to know what the back looks like. “Just put the fucking gun down. I’ve been shot enough today, thank you.”
Frank lowers the pistol. His eyes glued to the already closing wound.
I put my hand out. He stares at it. “Get up.” Slowly, he takes it. I haul him to his feet.
“Nice shot,” I say.
“Thanks.”
“I don’t think he’s dead.” If Simon gutting him in the fifties didn’t do it, I doubt this will either.
“Yeah, I know.”
“He’s—What do you mean, you know?”
Frank opens his mouth to say something but the radio on his belt squawks, announcing that backup’s on the way. ETA’s ten minutes. The hard resolve I’m used to comes back into his eyes.
“You. Out of here. Hang a right down the hall. I’ll cover for you. Your car’s up the hill. Key’s in the ignition.” He shoves me toward the door.
“The hell?” Not complaining, but I don’t know what’s going on.
“I don’t need you in an interrogation room. We’ll talk later.”
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