Mortality Bridge (33 page)

filling the view before him

oozing across the entrance glass

like a timelapse film of growing cancer

on distorting panes and metal frames

a black reflection slides

a black reflection of a car

a black reflection of a 1933 Franklin Model 173 seven passenger sedan.

Niko turns in time to see it glide up to the curb like a docking submarine. To hear the purring engine die and see the lights go dark. Niko turns and always turns to see the brakelights die as a leather wingtip shoe lifts off the pedal, always turns to fight the story he enacts, turns to thwart the hammer of tyrannic myth that nails him to his fate, turns to see a driver’s door open and close with a solid heavy chunk, to see a black cap with a glossy bill over evershadowed eyes deep in a paperskinned and jaundiced face, turns to see a pale thin hand hold up a sealed glass jar.

XX.
 

HOOCHIE COOCHIE MAN

DUMBLY NIKO WATCHES the Driver approach. It can’t be this easy. Not after all this.

And of course it isn’t. Weary and heartsore as Niko is he braces himself for some conflict but the Driver heads toward the casino entrance cradling the mason jar and spares him not the slightest glance. As the Driver passes by him with that tightly lidded jar in bony hand he sees that held within and glowing not at all is not a blacktipped feather but a lump of coal. Not Jemma but some other purloined soul.

Niko stays whatever provocation or obstruction might have welled up from within. However much he loathes and fears the sallow son of a bitch the Driver is still just a delivery boy. Do you want to spend what little you have left in you on the thing that brought Jemma here or on getting Jemma herself?

Follow him then. See where our delivery boy delivers.

The valet nods at the Driver but makes no move to park the Black Taxi as his twin had parked the Cadillac. No one but the Driver drives the Black Taxi. The Driver ignores the valet and strides past the huge glass doors that open before him and pulls the jar a little closer as he enters the casino.

Niko takes a deep breath and starts after him but then he stops. Looks back at the car. Oh no way. It’s too obvious.

Nonetheless he follows his hunch and walks to the Black Taxi and hoods his eyes and peers through the driver’s side window. Nope, nothing there. Niko gropes beneath the left front fender. Nope. He tries left back and right back and right front and son of a bitch there it is. A rectangular magnetic keyholder stuck to the underside of the fender. He shakes it and a key rattles.

Niko laughs bitterly and looks up at the godless sky and spreads his arms. Almost a parody of crucifixion. If he’d thought to look for a spare key outside the gate however long ago he might have simply driven here.

He drops the keyholder into the inner breast pocket of his jacket and then turns toward the coruscating light and glitter of the big casino, astonished that his heart is not pounding, that his hand is dry on the hardcase handle, that his breathing’s even. Either he’s too numb to care any longer or there’s nothing left inside him that will risk it.

His way is blocked and he looks up to see the valet frowning down. He steps aside and the valet steps with him. He sighs. The valet nods at the guitar case in Niko’s hand. “Back door, chief.” He jerks a thumb that way and looks through Niko and loudly chews his spearmint gum.

Niko sizes him up indifferently, then sets down the guitar case and moves to step past him. The expected hand comes up. Niko grabs it and ducks under it and turns clockwise with it and folds it down. The pop of dislocating elbow echoes in the driveway. Still twisting the arm Niko brings the wrist down to the pavement. The valet follows until his shoulder lands on the back of his own hand. His eyes are wide. His mouth works like a gaffed bass. Niko straightens and picks up the guitar case and steps past him. The doors open for him automatically. Ye who enter.

LIGHT AND SOUND envelop him. Polyglot hubbub and cries of pain, flashing neon and shattering glass, ringing bells and howling laughter, strobing lights and screeching brakes, striking klaxons and consumptive coughs, whirling gears and baying hounds, growling buzzers and screaming children, rattling dice and yowling cats, shuffled cards and cocking guns, clicking roulette wheels and churning tank treads, chuckling chips and ticking bombs, keno chimes and funeral bells, clapping hands and cracking whips, payoff gongs and marching jackboots, croupiers calling and rifle bolts clacking, tinny lounge music and air raid sirens, ringing coins and murmured treasons, roaring ovens and crackling ice swirled in glasses of smoky liquor. Smells of beer and cheap perfume and cigarettes and money and hideous endless desperate need.

The casino stretches off as far as he can see. Thick corinthian columns recede to infinity. A nicotine pall hangs on the sickly air. A constant rush of furious and pointless activity swarms like a stomped anthill. The floor is plush carpet, hunter green with a florentine pattern in burgundy and cream. Columns and walls are white marble veined in pale blue. The carpet fiber Niko treads is woven human ganglia, nervous systems of the tortured damned. The pale blue veins in the marble walls and columns are human veins once pumping blood but surging now with burning lye. Stretching off for miles are banks of slot machines run by naked patrons seated on the upturned mouths of slavering creatures slowly gnawing them to bloody gobbets. The damned are fused to their machines, right wrist merging with the arm of the one armed bandit and pulling, ever pulling, no scrap of humanity or personality remaining as their flickering consciousness focuses on the whirling bars, all their remnant being fixed upon the hope of one two three whirling eyes. Every millennium or so the eyes align and sweet relief comes as the monster beneath them ceases chewing for a solid minute. The only pleasure here the absence of pain. The eyes on the whirling bars are blinking and alive.

Tuxedoed demons of many shapes and sizes stride about like hurried maitres d’ and snap their fingers or claws or tentacles and fire off orders to misshapen dwarves who push preposterously laden carts past fishnet stockinged women wearing posture collars and tottering on nine inch heels while balancing huge drink trays crammed to overflowing.

Some tables hold demons, others imprison bleary desperate alcoholics chained to hard and angular chairs to order drinks that never come. At one table holding several dozen demons a waitress with eyes so sunken her face looks like a skull takes down orders as fast as she can write. One Coke with a cherry, one Diet Coke no cherry, one Cherry Coke with a cherry, one Diet Cherry Coke no cherry, one Coke with a lemon slice, one Lemon Coke, one Lemon Slice with a slice of lime, one Diet Lemon-Lime Slice with a cherry. And no ice on that Lemon Coke, hon.

Haggard waitresses of all ages and sizes and races queue before a brassrailed bar that stretches to a distant vanishing point and call out orders to gaunt and wide eyed bartenders who move as fast as they can to fill orders that will never stop or even slow.

One walleyed waitress turns away with a laden tray hoisted to her bony shoulder. She gets five yards before a demon sticks out a hoof and trips her. Tray and contents fly and mindless alcoholics strain their chains to suck spilled liquor from the living carpet. The tortured filament nervous system develops a fuzzy buzz. The little demon who tripped the waitress orders her to clean it up and fetch another round. The eternally harangued waitress bends to obey and passes out from the posture collar as a demon at a nearby table licks her nylon covered ass with a slobbering tongue.

Variations on this scene are repeated everywhere Niko looks. The din is deafening. It feels so strange to be indoors and in the light after all this unknown time.

Now a tuxedoed demon all angles and propriety strides toward him, rapier nose cutting the dense air and his expression a perpetual snit. He stops before Niko and eyes him up and down and glares at the guitar case. He shoots his cuffs and actually sniffs. “And where do we think we’re going?”

Niko lifts the guitar case slightly. “Gig.”

“I suggest we take a less conspicuous route.”

“I’m here to play for the boss.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“You tell me where to find him?”

“If we don’t know where to find him we certainly have no business seeing him.”

Niko wants to argue but Snit here is right, when you think about it. “Got a point there,” he says, and turns away and walks among the tortured throng who cry out not for aid or comfort but simply to give voice to their despair. Past hope past want past care. The farther in he goes the thicker Niko feels. Detached from self and surround. The cacophony become distant sussuration. Eyelids heavy. Feet hovering above the living carpet. Skin thick and itchy. All about a hollow echo like a giant transit terminal at rush hour looked at through a lens of fever dream. Guitar case a dead weight in his nerveless hand a thousand miles away. These sensations naggingly familiar. Maybe just exhaustion. But no. No. Something else. Something elusive. Like the unrecalled name of a former lover. Memory on tip of tongue awaiting utterance to fix it in the world.

Fix.

Niko stops amid the seething ruin of souls. He stares unseeing and listens to that old peaceful whisper suffuse into his mind like friendly fog. Like an old habit, yes?

Niko grips the case’s handle harder. His free hand brushes his locket as he moves to scratch and scratch his collarbone.

What you gonna do boy? You gonna shrug off a rush? Gonna jump this train?

Nope dont think so. Nothing to be done for it now. In for the longhaul. Rollercoasters left the starting gate and seatbelts come undone. Clack clack clack. Niko has left the building. Ride it out. Let it ride the highrollers say. Ride the white horse.

He shakes his head and gapes around the casino. Blur he fix recedes on tunnel down carpet footed ground, headed sky. place ace yer bets ets. faraway walls, jackpot bingo snake eyes craps, round and round she goes, just move a foot, just one. i gobble dug dare you.

A battered filthcaked hiking shoe slides forward. Now the other one. Just keep doing that. One foot in front of the other. That’s the ticket.

Looking only at the floor he makes his thickened way. Just walk. Don’t look up. Don’t listen. Just walk. He pictures his slack body on his living room floor in the Hollywood Hills. Empty syringe nearby. Someone faraway slapping his face. Come on bud stay with me hang in there breathe.

How could he have been dosed? Cause that’s sure as shit what’s happening. He’s rushing like a dog with its head out the window of a Ferrari. That old familiar glow heating up his veins. Each thought like a card in an evershuffled deck, lost and unremembered as the next one comes along. He hears down a narrow tube. Sees through the big end of the binoculars. Feels over a bad phone connection. Wants to sleep. Maybe is.

What’s worse is the awful happy familiarity of it. As if his body’s cells contain a memory of his leaden junky days and now they’re pricking up their ears and standing on hind legs to bark and yap for more.

It would be so good to just sit down. To lie back and sink into the carpet. Sink into the floor. Through the floor. The ground. Past mantle. Past magma. Down deep. Down to bask in Hell itself. Down.

NIKO’S HEAD JERKS up. Shit. How long?

Around him the awful traffic flows, the roaring din continues. Always flows, always roars.

Fight it god damn it. After all this battle with the outside world will you finally be laid out by a little pinch of chemicals in your veins? You need to move. You need to keep moving.

Come on Hiking Boy, get them shoes in gear. Walk.

AFTER A TIME he couldn’t estimate Niko realizes he is staring down at his unmoving feet. What’s the deal? He orders his left foot to move but it stays where it is. He orders his right foot to move and it stays rooted too. Niko frowns. His thoughts are congealed gelatin. A slug exudes a slime trail in his brain. His ears ring.

He glances up. He’s looking down a corridor paneled in mahogany. He frowns and glances at the deepgreen carpet. When he looks up again he’s standing at the end of the corridor and staring stupidly at the woodpaneled wall with no memory of having walked here. The casino tumult left behind.

Niko turns to look back down the length of the corridor and jumps when he sees someone turning toward him a few feet away. This man jumps too. The man is bearded gaunt and strange eyed. Long hair matted and grayshot. Filthy jacket shredded and frayed.

Jeans blown out at knees and ass. Clothes all mottled with filth and shit and blood dried brown. Pale skin bruised and scabbed and scraped and draping from the skeleton that wears it. The knuckles of both hands swollen and arthritic. His ragged beard is streaked with gray and his face is purely haunted. The expression of a sole survivor of some epic rout. A patch of scar across his forehead. Recently broken nose healed out of true. He looks old and tired and sore abused.

Niko drops his guitar case and the man drops his guitar case. Niko is facing a mahogany wall dominated by a tall mirrored door where a moment ago there was a corridor.

Niko silently regards the silent mirror’s gaunt inspection. But for the filthy beard his face is nearly that of his demon self on board the train. Every painful step of his descent etched there. A strange flat light of calm acceptance in the dark unblinking eyes. Long past surprise or horror. Some mad prophet gone into the desert looking for his god and come back having found him terribly.

To the mirror’s left a lone round button: