Nightlife (25 page)

Couldn’t very well just cut her loose. Right now she was on his side, and Torquemada himself probably couldn’t get her to talk about Tony’s business dealings. She might even
enjoy
such interrogation. But set her forcibly free, and formerly tight lips might get very loose in a hurry. He couldn’t have that.

As well, it wasn’t a good time to up and off her either. Erik Webber was already kissing dirt. He was planning to do in two more, through the buffer zone of a contract job. Another one that he had ties with suddenly turning up dead, well— bad timing for that sort of thing. Police could be quite determined in hunting for common denominators. Even if they couldn’t turn up proof positive on him regarding any of them, he still didn’t need the extra attention.

So string her along awhile longer, and an option would arise. Tony was sure of that. Patience was the name of this game.

So much for distraction number one. The blond One. The second was very green, and packaged according to kilogram.

No getting around it, skullflush had thrown a major ripple into his life and career. Six keys, just waiting for . . . something.

What to do with the stuff was a question never far from mind. Annoyingly unanswerable, and that was no good at all. He was used to having control. Tony Mendoza took charge of circumstances, not the other way around.

This was the only time he had allowed a shipment to get through his front door. Except for tiny sample tastes, easily flushable, that came in handy for deals, or coaxing sweeties to bed, like candy to bribable children. Never more than a few grams before. And six keys? Unthinkable.

He was used to very short storage time. Have buyers ready to take a shipment almost as soon as it came in. Of course, he needed time to add his own cut to the mix. But in general, move-it-in-and-move-it-out, that was SOP.

He couldn’t very well keep it at any of the safe houses he used for cutting and temp storage. Not this stuff. No honor among thieves in this business, no way to trust the safe-house guys a hundred percent. They’d fudge from a bag here, a bag there, scooping out their own cut. If you couldn’t catch them red-handed, what could you do? Live with it. One more shipment of coke wouldn’t cause a second glance among them. Throw the green stuff into the equation, and it could be an engraved invitation for trouble.

So he kept it hidden here at the penthouse. Maybe dangerous, and maybe not. Laws were pretty specific on what constituted an illegal drug. He was willing to bet the U.S. judicial system had never encountered anything like this before. No provisions made, no breakdown of chemical components on their books. For all he knew, skullflush might even be legal. So far.

At any rate, it was probably best to keep it under no one’s nose but his own.

What to do, what to do? He’d briefly wondered about trying to move skullflush to the army. They were always in the market for a new weapons angle, something the Reds didn’t have in the works. Given the effects, the possibilities were mind-boggling. Battle scenarios. The chips are down, and the platoon whips out concentrated capsulized doses. Breaks them open and pops them under their noses. And in a matter of a minute or two, you’ve got a platoon of the scariest badass soldiers
any
army has ever sent into battle.

Interesting, and no doubt the army had loads of cash to invest in such projects. Those guys experimented with stuff that would turn the hair of the general populace snow white if it became public knowledge.

There was, however, a big gaping hole in that road. Once army claws were sunk into the project, they would waste no time wasting the middleman. Tony Mendoza would cease to exist. Legally, bodily, spiritually.

So back to square one.

Except a single word continued to nag at him, demanding he give it more attention.
Experimentation.

Coke he understood, and crack, heroin, crank, and everything else pouring through the pipeline. Just variations on a basic theme. Highs and lows of one sort or another. Didn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out their appeal.

But skullflush was one monumentally different can of tuna. It didn’t just open your mind or cloud your vision. The stuff drop-kicked you into a brand-new stratosphere. Body, mind, and soul. Sasha had filled in a few blanks, given him glimpses into the effects. But that was like trying to enjoy a Caribbean vacation by listening to someone describe postcards. You had to live it yourself.

I got to know,
he thought.
Got to know what that shit’s like.

And this meant compromise. In ethics. In his own loose code of behavior. In the values that had gotten him this far in a very competitive field. In one sense he thought himself nearly as prudish as the temperate bitches during Prohibition:
The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.
Update it by a few decades and turn it inside out:
The shit that goes into everybody else’s nose shall never hoover into mine.
Same difference.

But when there was progress to be made, one thing was certain. Every scientist in the world knew it—

Rules had to remain flexible.

Wednesday night.

Half a country away, Erik Webber was just hours into his final resting place, and Justin Gray was getting morosely drunk while April Kingston tried futilely to bring him out of his shell.

And on Tampa’s home turf, on Westshore Boulevard, Tony was gifted with an evening all by his lonesome. He seized the opportunity when Sasha began to whine about wanting to go out. Dancing, lights, music—she said she was going into withdrawal.

Tony recognized a gift of fate. Gave Lupo a couple hundred in play money and told him to take her out until she got it out of her system. Maybe start her out at Masquerade, the same place she’d been when originally joining their world. Don’t bring her back until she’s worn herself out.

Lupo didn’t like such matchmaking. “She’s too close to everything, Tony. Airhead like that, man, you are playing with fire.”

“She’ll be fine. Trust me on this.”

Lupo frowned. He had a fearsome scowl. “It’s not you I don’t trust.” The meaning was implicit.

“Man, what a bitch when your friends don’t get along.” Tony sighed, looking askance a moment. “Listen, if it’ll help thaw the ice between you two, take her somewhere and tear off a piece for yourself.” Sometimes his generosity surprised even him.

Lupo looked surprised. Pleasantly, after a moment. “Seriously?”

Tony shrugged. “Ah, why not. No skin off my pecker. Give her a nice change of pace for a night. Make her appreciate the best when she gets back to me.”

“Not if I bring her back stretched out.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

Fifteen minutes later they were gone, Sasha decked out in black with her hair teased into a cloud that should come with its own meteorological report. And none too happy about Tony staying behind tonight. She’d forget about it soon enough. Soon as her stilettoed feet hit the dance floor, she wouldn’t even remember who she was there with. One blissed-out babe.

Tony was blissed out on his own terms. Locked within his pastel blue and white sanctum sanctorum. Eased back into his recliner surrounded by the horseshoe of softly burbling aquariums, their hoods the only light. He wore jeans only, no shoes, no shirt. The shark’s tooth hung against the smooth tan of his chest. And at his side, resting atop the chair’s arm . . .

A healthy dose of skullflush.

Six lines were chopped and paralleled on his gold cigarette case. This at his left arm. In his right he held a rolled dollar bill. Tight and ready for duty.

Even before doing line one, he felt a tingling in his belly. Anticipation, nerves. The curdling in the guts of a pioneer ready to step boldly beyond the known. And venture into the unknown, past the edge of a flat earth. To confront Heaven or Hell or whatever else lay in that next realm.

Fish, swimming, circling. Water, soothing as it bubbled. There was nothing else, no other world beyond this room. Only the ones accessed through mind and soul.

He snorted the first two lines, and they slammed his head back against the recliner. Pain, murky green and gold, and a feeling as if he had lit a string of firecrackers in the back of his skull. He moaned aloud. No turning back now. His nose dripped, but he held fast to purpose and lowered for the rest. The next line, and the next, and the next. And the last.

The cigarette case clattered to the tiles. He was glad the penthouse was soundproof. Because he screamed. Oh, how he screamed. Loud enough to wake the dead and send them running for cover.

Not out of pain.

Not out of fear.

But out of head-to-head confrontation with infinity. He found himself standing on the brink of stars, looking down into pits of primordial slime. And here he was, vainglorious adventurer, poised somewhere between the two. At their whim and mercy, for they would send him where they damn well pleased. Everything he had believed, everything he had been taught, everything that had been genetically encoded within his body his bones his blood his cells his nuclei his intertwining dual strands of DNA—it had all been erased.

He was plunging through aeons now as if they were ticks of a clock. There was still self-awareness, but self was no longer the same. Self paled within infinity. Self was scrutinized and blasted with unyielding green light and shown to be the puny thing it was. Self was laughable. Self was humbled. Self was reduced to knee-quaking awe.

No wonder this stuff had seemed to blow the minds of those he had seen take it. Sasha, Justin, Trent Pollard. What they must have seen, experienced, there in his presence—no wonder they had freaked. They had been expecting a coke rush. He had not. He had known so much better what to expect. Even so, it was all he could do to keep from peeling the leather off the chair arms.

For now he was learning by more than mere observation. Now it was strictly hands-on. Scoping out this wondrous new world from the inside.

Falling, cranking back the hands of time . . .
falling . . .

And only when he hit rock bottom was he able to gather that nebula of swirling wits. And rise once again. To walk, a new being.

Alternative evolution.

There was pain now, deeper and more fundamental than what had come from inhaling the drug. By comparison, that had been superficial. This ran bone deep. But it was distant, could’ve been somebody else’s. That was it. Some guy named Tony Mendoza, back in a mixed ball of past and future. Both were the same, history spun in circles. Rise and fall of life-forms, birthed in oceanic stewpot to crawl forth into mud onto dry land to scale trees to soar through skies to fall, finally, extinct. Back into the mud, to leach back to the sea. To nurture with rotting bones a new hierarchy destined to rise in its place.

pain

But he could cope. Rebirth should never be easy.

He could feel the ache and pull of bones in rebellion, the hardening of the new flesh. The conical head erupting from his own. An eye on either side, huge, like dark buttons. Jaws jutting and muscular, rimmed with triangular teeth. A gullet that craved meat and blood, gulped hot and fresh and kicking, straight from the source. He breathed through his mouth, still, but bloodless wounds had opened on either side of his neck, near the ends of the silvery scaled hide.

He lifted his hands. Unchanged, more or less. Although webbed, translucent membranes between the fingers. As if they had once been fins and had split to better serve on land. The best of both worlds.

Tony laughed, an airy wind-gurgling sound. He scrambled from the recliner to fall before his largest tank, his pride and joy. A dozen oval shapes glided within. He caught sight of his reflection in the glass.

He felt no terror.

No disgust.

No worries.

Only the power of exultation, superiority.

And when he rose to plunge his head and shoulders into the tank, he felt the powerful commingling of brotherhood. The piranha did not attack.
Would
not attack. Not one of their own.

He breathed, not through mouth but through gills, sifting oxygen along blood-gorged membranes. And he felt the rhythm and flow of the water, this time from their viewpoint. Sensations like tiny electric currents from receptors within his hide, alert to splashes, temperatures, irregularities, anything that would home him in on prey. He felt the mental singularity linking them all, capable of turning the group into an eating machine. Noise and taste and odor became tactile sensations, something between solid and liquid.

Tony pushed himself up and out, slinging silvery arcs of water to spatter walls and floor. He roared, his throat retaining vestigial traces of human vocalization, his mouth incapable of manipulating them. No matter. Words were of no consequence. Only sensations.

hunger

He fell to his knees, head dripping water to chest and tiles. He reached for a shelf beneath the aquarium adjacent to the piranha tank. Seized the box punched with small round holes. Felt with delight, in a brand-new way, the tiny scramblings within. Smelled wisps of mortal fear emanating from the box—
smelled as never before.

Tony ripped the lid away, and the high-pitched squeaking was a packet of exquisite needles to his receded ears. He held the box aloft. Opened his jaws wide, his mouth a vast tooth-rimmed pit, all sharp points. Tipped the box . . .
carnivore ecstasy . .
. and let the mice fall.