Nightlife (37 page)

Nearly one kilo left, a gift of fate. He would kill them, oh yes. And knew precisely what form he would take when doing it. One more look at the chair convinced him there was no alternative.

He looked up to seek solace in Lupo’s eyes when a scream the equal of his own rang out from the kitchen. Followed by the shattering and splash of what sounded like a pitcher. Full, naturally. Why not, why didn’t they just open up the faucets and flood the whole penthouse?

He wearily flipped his hand toward Lupo, toward the door. Sasha was out there somewhere gagging with revulsion.

“Go see what’s wrong
now.”

Tony hung his head in his hands. What had happened here, and to life in general? Control was spinning out of his grasp. This night had gone from bad to worse to absolute balls-to-the-wall nightmare.
In my home,
he thought numbly.
They’ve been in my home!

He looked around at the other aquariums, undisturbed, and their intact beauty offered shallow comfort. Any one of them would have been painful to lose, but at least tolerable. But
this?
He felt as if he had lost family.

Justin, April—dead. In the most hideous ways he could dream up. He would draw out their agonies for hours and hours and—

Lupo was standing in the doorway. His face was even graver than it had been moments before.

“Well?” Tony said. “What was it?”

Then he saw what Lupo held.

Pale, waxy white, as if all the blood had drained away some time ago. It didn’t even look real. Looked like some gag gift you’d buy in a novelty shop and stick inside another kid’s lunchbox. Except for the ugly turquoise ring. Only one guy around with enough
huevos
to wear that thing and not care how it looked.

“At least now we know,” said Lupo. He threw it down in disgust. The severed hand splatted to the floor and lay there like a dead spider, fingers slightly curled inward. Tony saw the jagged shank of bone protruding through the wrist, and wondered if he might possibly have sadly underestimated Justin and April.

“We’ll have to take care of this ourselves now, Tony. Get your head on straight, and we’ll take care of this ourselves.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Tony whispered.

And took one more look at the chair.

It took one sick imagination to do that. Such malevolent glee. Twelve beautiful fish, killed, arranged into a circle, a crescent, and the last two by themselves.

A perfectly rendered smiley face.

She tossed, she turned. Knowing that nothing so simple as a change of positions was going to help. Tonight, for April, sleep was likely to fall under the category of luxury.

Justin slept beside her, apparently soundly. Ironic, his sleeping better these past few nights than he had in quite some time. As if his self-esteem and sense of peace with himself had finally returned under fire.

She loved him; this she knew without question. And therein lay the paradox. He was, in fits and starts, rising to challenges. Yet April had to admit her initial attraction had been, in part, in response to his vulnerability. His teetering balance with pinwheeling arms, near the brink of ruin. Florence Nightingale to the rescue. Only Florence had done some teetering herself.

It had all started with the hands. . . .

April sighed; shouldn’t have yelled at Justin quite so virulently in the car. On the ride back to the motel, he had filled her in on everything that had transpired while he and Kerebawa were in the condo. Destroying the aquarium, turning the piranha into a twisted game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. A nice touch, and it would definitely peel a few layers away from Tony’s already questionable sanity. But she had spared few adjectives in telling him just how blindly stupid he’d been in destroying evidence that could link Tony with Erik’s death, should the police ever decide to move on him.

As well, Justin had told her of leaving the hired killer’s hand in a pitcher, a move Kerebawa especially seemed to enjoy. He told them of some drug lord in Colombia whom he had cornered and whose hand he had amputated when the man went for a weapon. The two of them had laughed over it, some deep-seated bond forming between them that had as its foundation blood and bone and destruction. Savagery for its own psychologically devastating sake. She knew it was absolutely essential in having to fight someone of Tony’s ilk, but as Justin and Kerebawa laughed at his story, she had never felt quite so excluded from an inside joke. At that moment, there existed no cultural differences whatsoever between Justin and Kerebawa. Which, brotherhood-of-man rhetoric aside, she found a bit unsettling. It made you wonder if, when the niceties of civilization were scraped away, men were just as primal now as they had been at the dawn of hominids and the opposable thumb.

Another hand-oriented reference. Freudian, no doubt. She was glad to have at least gotten rid of that.

She’d nailed up a good front of nonchalance about it most of the time, just as she could when dealing with someone in the business world she could barely tolerate. But Justin would never know the unease it had caused her. Half out of irrational fear that somehow its owner’s purpose would remain a driving force. That she would awaken to find that it had crabwalked across the room and clamped itself around her throat to finish the job begun Saturday night.

The killer’s hand. And Erik’s, too, she had to admit. It had all begun to mentally fester once they had learned of Erik’s fate.

She thought of sitting with Justin a couple nights ago, before their world had convulsed, as she was showing him the photo albums. It had been years since she had rearranged them, removing every photo shot since she was six that showed her father’s left hand.

What was left of it, anyway.

The day was etched into memory with vitriolic intensity. Cut into her brain, and the particular fissure would probably be labeled.

Six years old. Summer, home from school all day back in St. Pete and second grade seemed farther away than the stars. Hot all day, like it was getting to be now.

Daddy had been on vacation too, using up one of his two weeks per annum while he puttered around the house doing Dad-things. Stuff that, to six-year-old minds, seemed to serve little purpose. He was turning the carport into a garage, walling it in.

Perfect summer day. She ran amok in the neighborhood, barefoot in the grass, neat little houses on a neat little street, and no matter where she went, she could hear the sounds of Daddy hammering. Daddy sawing. Daddy ripping boards down to proper size.

April had been in the backyard when a kid from across the street wandered over in the adjacent yard. Patrick, his name was. Patrick used the neighbor’s yard as a shortcut to get to some friend who lived the next block over. He was six, maybe seven.

“What are you doing?” he had asked.

“Planting food.”

April had some kernels of corn and a buckeye and was digging a small hole behind the bougainvillaea. Patrick watched as she finished the hole and planted them in a row and covered them up. She wondered when they would start growing.

They talked about what they were going to be when they grew up. She was going to be a farmer. Patrick said he was going to be a doctor. Somehow this inspired a discussion of bodies. She no longer remembered the words, only that Patrick had a lot of mistaken ideas about female anatomy. He thought girls peed just like boys, thought they looked the same down below and everything. Not that she knew what boys looked like
down there,
but whatever he was describing didn’t sound much like what she had.

So they made a deal.

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Sounded good. It would clear up a lot of questions. She had always wondered how Daddy could manage to pee standing up without making a mess.

Shorts were lowered. Underwear too. They looked. They touched. Okay, so there were a few differences. Big deal.

And then Mommy was peering over the bougainvillaea, forever on the lookout for new damage done by her tomboy daughter and drawn out to hunt because of a missing shovel. Her eyes widened. Her mouth started to shriek. April and Patrick looked up, raised their underwear and shorts, faces embossed with sudden guilt.

Mommy stormed around the bush and seized a kid in each hand, fingers clamping onto an ear on each head. Screeching about how awful they had been, touching each other’s bodies there,
there
of all places, and April was crying because it hurt, her ear would be ripped from her head, and Mommy was dragging them back around front, their six-year-old feet struggling furiously to keep pace because Mommy’s legs were so much longer and so were her strides.

The three of them stormed noisily into the carport, now half garage. Sawdust lingered in the air, and she breathed in its hot, dry smell and coughed, tears streaking her cheeks. Daddy had to stop work, looking like some hot, red, wet version of the father she was used to, and as he listened to what Mommy had to say he got even hotter and redder. They sent Patrick bawling across the street with the threat that they would be calling his parents later—oh, the kiss of death.

Daddy was angry but kept his temper from getting the best of him, just kept telling her, “April, I’m disappointed in you, I’m very disappointed in you.” His words were lead, huge, crushing her down down down, his disappointment even worse than the three light swats he administered to her bottom. And as she stumbled into a corner, sobbing, she felt overwhelmed by a terrifying witches’ brew of love and hate in her heart.

Daddy began to work again.

The gratingly noisy table saw whirred to life once more.

And there came the splintering whine of wood being cleaved in two by its blade.

And then Daddy suddenly lurched away from the table saw with a numb look on his face and his hand
his hand
it couldn’t be running like a red faucet couldn’t be bleeding that much
couldn’t be in two pieces not that no!

Mommy came running, aid and comfort and emergency medical care, hurriedly wrapping a rag around Daddy’s spouting hand as his face paled and drained, and now Mommy’s was the red face as she whirled upon her daughter cowering in the corner and shouted, “This is your fault this is all your fault, you distracted him, it’s
your fault, April!”

Through the tears, inside the shrieks, the six-year-old April knew it was true, all horribly true.

Barring her brief stint working for and with Tony Mendoza, it was without doubt the worst incident of her life. But not without positive repercussions, strangely enough. It hadn’t really come up until college, when she’d ended up at Student Health Services with a near-terminal case of exhaustion, no small thanks due to a twenty-credit-hour semester. She had consented to a few sessions with a psych counselor, was rewarded with the usual analytical flow chart of cause-and-effect. A relentless desire to succeed because she was forever trying to make that day up to her father. No price too great to avoid his disappointment. Her counselor had even gone so far as to suggest that April made sure to choose pursuits where the results were tangible. Grades could be checked on a semester report. Artwork could be looked at, displayed. Ad infinitum.

She hadn’t gone back after that day. Fearful of making too much progress, maybe. She was used to success, lived with it comfortably. The so-called cure might very well undercut the drive.

And what would they think now, her parents? Just how proud and beaming would they be if they knew darling daughter was slumming in the drug milieu, in addition to her erstwhile pornvid feature? Shootings, burglarizing dealers, corpse concealment, while her hard-won business risked suffocation via inattention. She steered her imagination away from it. So. They must never know,
ever,
whatever the cost.

Your fault, April.
She could hear it now as easily as when she was six. And now, twenty-some years later, curled onto the bed of a cheap motel beside someone she thought was probably as damaged inside as she, April still couldn’t convince herself that it wasn’t.

Come Tuesday morning, it was April’s turn to go to the office for the motel’s version of a free continental breakfast. More bad coffee, more tough doughnuts. As Justin ate, he thought of the Viet Cong in Nam, squatting in the jungle while eating rice and fish heads. No-frills food to toughen you up. Survive the coffee and doughnuts, and their abuse to kidneys and jaw muscles, and the rest of the day seemed more palatable.
Eating to Win, Part Two.