Nightlife (14 page)

“Okay, okay.” Erik lifted his hands in surrender. “You’ve overwhelmed me with your vastly superior intellect and powers of persuasion.” He looked askance for a moment, got a dreamy cast to his face. “Wow.”

“What?”

“A shared consciousness. I’m just trying to think of all the sexual applications in this.”

“Degenerate.”

“It’s a way of life.” Erik stood, motioned Justin to do likewise. “Come on, let’s bail. Look for more parrots we can corrupt.”

It sounded good. Appalling a blue-hair now and then was good for the soul, kept you young.

But questions remained, unanswered, uneasy. Who had been last night’s damsel in distress? How’d she figure in with Mendoza? He tried to tell himself he was better off not knowing.

Curiosity killed a lot more than cats.

After a night of baby-sitting Sasha with her brand-new look, Tony had started to wonder if it hadn’t actually been boredom that did in Marlin Perkins. All that waiting for something to happen in the Wild Kingdom. After she’d hit the door, as if to eat through the narrow peep-slot, she had backed off. Paced around the room a bit. Settled into a corner. Bayed mournfully at the naked light bulb every now and then. Mostly just whimpered softly.

Incredible. OD on some powder, and instead of going permanent schizo or keeling over from heart failure, the mythical beast within takes over. Just incredible.

Tony was dressed for waiting now. He’d had Lupo swing by the penthouse to grab him a change of clothes, back to combat pants and black mesh. This leaky basement was no place for a two-grand suit. Slimy stinkhole, the more he stayed down here, the more he disliked the place.

It reminded him of a sewer-level sub-basement he’d once been in in New Orleans. Just your basic business trip mixed with enough pleasure to make it look legit. Some guys were developing a trans-Gulf of Mexico conduit from Florida’s west coast—Tampa, natch—to the Big Easy. The guys had also turned up among their ranks one who had been into serious profit-skimming.

They had taken him to the catacombs beneath a French Quarter nightclub, a veritable dungeon down there, and let their displeasure be known. Turned the guy’s balls into a pincushion for a packet of four-inch needles, then used a .22 automatic to widen his nasal cavities. Then dumped his body into an underground stream that carried it into the Mississippi, and from there it could sail all the way to the gulf and beyond. A very efficient system.

Tony was thinking about that place when Lupo came back in midmorning. Always had to keep the business rolling, no matter what, keep those runners trotting and get those connections made.

“What are we going to do with her?” Lupo asked.

“Not sure yet.” Tony was kicked back into a chair scrounged from upstairs. Better than sitting on the damp floor.

Sasha had come back to herself, as it were, a bit over an hour before. No snout, no fur, no claws. No she-wolf, just a frightened little mussed-up death groupie sleeping the experience off like a bad hangover.

Lupo reached beneath an untucked shirt, big and loose and all the better to conceal behind, and pulled out his MAC-10. Nice little submachine gun not much bigger than the average pistol. A real favorite among the players. Accuracy wasn’t for shit at long ranges, but you didn’t need marksmanship quality to blow apart some bozo trying to jack with you on a face-to-face deal.

“Want me to do her?” Lupo asked quietly. “She
has
served her purpose.”

“Put it away,” he muttered, and Lupo did as asked. “That’s too messy for here anyway. Same for your straight razor.”

“I could just break her neck.”

Tony shook his head. “Nah. ’Cause sure, I got a few questions answered, but for every one, seems like ten more have popped up.” He grinned. “Lupo, man, you should’ve seen that shit work! I couldn’t believe it—just like Lon Chaney, I swear. You know? We got a gold mine here if we figure out what to do with the stuff.”

Lupo nodded, strolled a bit closer, hunkered down on his haunches. “You can’t just turn it loose like coke.”

“Huh, don’t I know
that.
Do that, we’ll end up with a lot of scenes like what happened at the Apocalips. Which means patterns. Which means the police’ll have something concrete to dig for. Which means somebody’ll eventually point their little finger right back at me.” He shook his head. “Fuck a duck, man. I’m sitting on six keys of blow that I can’t move. Nearly a hundred grand that I’m not gonna get dime one back on. I could choke that fucking Escobar if I didn’t have a feeling there’s some way to get a return on this.”

He slumped in the chair, pursed his lips in thought. Time to run through a few facts and speculations. Look at this rationally.

Origins? South American rain forest, that’s all he knew. Probably some sort of Indian drug. Wouldn’t be like the Bolivian and Peruvian farmers raising coca. So Indian, then, their version of North American Indians’ mescaline and magic mushrooms. Except, obviously, a whole lot more potent. Who knew
what
the Stone Age folks down there believed in, what they practiced. And what actually went on in the jungles. Their magic. Tony had a not-quite-skeptic’s healthy respect for such things.

Potency? Again, obviously strong. As he understood it, these six keys of skullflush, as he himself had so cleverly coined it, were what was left after the raw stuff had been refined. Get rid of the impurities, just like distilling corn mash into white lightning that’s maybe ninety-five percent pure alcohol. Same principle. A dose of this would be stronger than an equivalent amount of raw powder. There was another influencing factor here as well: the stuff hadn’t been cut. Normally, cocaine was cut at nearly every stage of the game, from wholesalers to midlevel distributors to the lowliest of dealers. With manitol, lidocaine, benzocaine, lactose, sucrose—the possibilities were legion. Dilute the purity and expand the powder base, and an already considerable profit margin is broadened even further. By the time it hit the street, the typical toot-head wasn’t buying but maybe fifteen percent coke, the rest filler. Skullflush, however, hadn’t been cut, and it would be a lot more difficult to do so unobtrusively, to come up with a mixer that same milky green color.

How did it work? He hadn’t the foggiest. But at least he had an inside track as to what it felt like in the interim. A lovely lass who had gone through a trial by fire and lived to see the next day.

Be a bit jumpy to get rid of her this soon.

“Go get her some breakfast,” he told Lupo finally. He stood, stretched his muscles. He’d been in that chair a long time. Felt like an expectant father or something.

“Breakfast?” Lupo clearly hadn’t expected this.

“Breakfast, yeah. Anything. Egg McMuffins, I don’t care. Just get her some breakfast.” He peeled a five from the wad in his pocket and passed it over.

“Breakfast,” Lupo muttered, and left up the stairs.

Tony crossed over to the big iron door, rapped on it a couple of times, opened up. Stepped inside. Curled up in one corner, on her side, Sasha opened her eyes and looked curiously at him. Sleepily. As if she were waking up in his bed instead of some damp cellar floor in a room where day from night had little meaning. She groaned and sat up.

“You feeling okay?” he asked. Ever the concerned gentleman.

“I have a headache.” Very quiet, very soft.

She rubbed her skull. Girl was a mess. Clothes twisted around, hair snarled. Slicked with grimy moisture, spotted with dried green snot.

Tony squatted beside her, playing up his concerned eyes, touched the back of his hand to her forehead. Papa taking care of his wayward little girl. She didn’t jerk her head back, and he took that as a good sign.

“I don’t suppose that’s ever happened to you before,” he said, then snickered. Then pulled on a suitably worried face.

“What did that stuff do to me? What did
you
do to me?”

“It was a big surprise to me too, baby. You scared the hell out of me. I didn’t know what was going on any more than you.” He cocked an eyebrow. “You
do
remember. Don’t you?”

Sasha looked at her soiled hands, felt her face. Expressed a certain relief that all was normal again. “Yeah.” Her voice was foggy, faraway. “I remember . . . changing. Tony, what
was
that stuff?”

He shook his head. “I just don’t know, hon. I swear I thought it was some new kind of coke. You know I’d never have done anything I thought might hurt you.” Tony wished he could see his own face. Felt like he dripped with the sincerity of Pat Boone. “I’m sorry. Once it started happening, I figured it was better to keep you in here so you didn’t hurt anybody, or yourself.”

She nodded weakly. Smiled up at him. Trustingly. This girl was too much. He had her eating out of his hand.

“I got Lupo out getting you some breakfast. Feel like eating?”

She pushed up to sit a little higher against the wall. She looked like a rag doll left out in the rain. “I’m a little hungry.”

“Good girl.” A reassuring smile. “So what was it like when you were tripping? Did you know what was going on? Did you know who you were the whole time?”

Her eyes narrowed as she dredged mind and memory. Upstairs, somebody cranked the ghetto blaster. Basslines thumped through, no melody. Happy hour started early in the crack house. She didn’t seem to notice.

“Did I really change?” she whispered. “Or was it all in my mind?”

“You really did. I saw it.”

Her eyes glowed, awestruck. “Intense.” A strange smile. “I knew who I was, all along. I just felt . . . different. Stronger. Almost like I was immortal. It didn’t really hurt
too
bad at first, or feel uncomfortable, so much as it was just scary ’cause I didn’t know what was going on at first. I think I had presence of mind, enough to know what I was doing. But it wasn’t like I was thinking like
me
anymore either. I was, and I wasn’t. Does that make sense?”

He nodded. “As much as anything does.”

Sasha looked at her hands, the torn lace glovelet hanging from one. The other lay on the floor a few feet away. She flexed her fingers, where once there had been claws.

“I liked it,” she said after a while. “Once I knew I wasn’t going to lose my mind. I thought I might die at first, but that was okay. It was like I kept going back, and back.”

“Back where?”

“Through time. Through evolution.” She looked him straight-on, head atilt. Weird smile. “People could do that, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Some of them could, at least.
Change.
You understand that while you’re in there.” Tony felt prickles of excitement running through him as he listened.
What have I stumbled onto here?

“Everything was so much more vivid too. I could smell you. Smell your fear. Smell the smoke upstairs. I could hear better. Tony, when can I have some more?”

“I don’t know, babe. Gotta be safe first. This isn’t the kind of thing you can do just anywhere, you know.”

She nodded. “This stuff had something to do with what happened at the Apocalips. Didn’t it?”

How much should he tell her? No more than needed. The experience hadn’t freaked her, and this was good. No need to worry about her running into the long arms of the law, crying about how Tony Mendoza had turned her into the big bad wolf. Still, no reason to get loose-lipped. Tell her only enough to keep her interested.

“I think maybe it did. I was there that night, gave some to a guy. Didn’t know that had anything to do with it, though.”

“But you saw me. And now you know.”

“Yeah.”

Tony watched her grow increasingly self-conscious over the state she was in. She wiped at the grime, the snot.

And now I know.
But what, exactly? That he had something the free white world had in all likelihood never experienced before? Something like that. With only a very few people privy to the secret. Knowledge is power, if you know how to use it.

And he was sitting on a virtual powderkeg.

Except there was still one untidy loose end that was looking better off trimmed. Justin Gray. Guy had sniffed enough to give him a taste of this stuff. Maybe he hadn’t gone all the way in, but it had probably been enough to give him a notion as to just how powerful the stuff was. The look on his face Tuesday night, as he hung on to that railing, had said it all.