Nightlife (57 page)

The Lincoln gained, even got close enough to crimp its front fender against their rear. The Aries wavered, glass and plastic littering the pavement like confetti. It was coming back for a second taste when Justin cut left around a bus with curious faces pressed against the glass, looking down in restrained panic.

April sat rigid in her seat. He had a momentary thought that he would prefer to be doing this alone, not for her safety, just that he no longer cared to have her around. It was emotionally safer that way. He uneasily began to realize that she was becoming the receptacle for every free-floating bit of fury boiling inside. He wanted to blame her for the rain, for Kerebawa’s death. Wanted to blame her because Tony was as tenacious as a pit bull on the attack, would not give it up even though common sense screamed for it. Wanted to blame her for things he’d not even thought of yet. Wanted to lean over into her face and yell until his lungs were raw, that none of this would have happened had she just had the courage to live up to the consequences of her past and not knuckled under to Mendoza.

But the road rolled on, and so did they, in tortured silence more corrosive than bile. Had Saturday evening traffic not been so plentiful, Tony would more than likely have already borne down on them and ground them into an end-over-end junkpile.

Nearer to the heart of the city, 1-275 made its curve to the southwest, toward St. Pete and the bay. He had no choice but to follow, did not want to coax Tony into a chase through the city’s streets. As recklessly as he was barreling along after them, drop him into inner-city traffic with that juggernaut and watch the casualties mount up in his wake. So southwest, then.

“Justin, where are you going?” April, tight and wired.

“I don’t know.” An honest answer, wearily offered.

“We can’t keep this up, Justin. Pretty soon we’ll run out of heavy traffic, and
then
do you know what he can do to us?”

“Hey, I’m trying, all right?” He glared at her, a gaze to wilt flowers. “You got any better ideas? I’m all ears!”

He sagged against the door. Hated this, hated everything, hated the speed, the tropical landscape, the other vehicles he dodged with no more concern than if this were a giant game of bumper cars. Hated himself for falling in with psychos and head-case bitches who masked their neuroses until they already had their claws sunk into your heart. Hated himself some more, on general principles.

The highway was an endless flatland, arrow straight. Open fields with gauntlets of palms on both sides. Stretches of glass office buildings and multistory hotels alternating with suburban tracts encroaching upon the highway. Billboards like widely spaced dominos. Justin had the Dodge opened up as wide out as its engine would chug.

At last they rolled through the succession of gentle curves that he remembered from his previous trip to St. Pete, the perfect night with April when she had shown him where she’d grown up. The curves that sucked them toward the Old Bay and the Howard Frankland Bridge spanning it.

Justin gripped the wheel and fumed, high-octane adrenaline burning through veins and arteries. He felt like a machine whirling toward inevitable breakdown, an explosion of parts that would rain shrapnel for yards in every direction. Couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten, his belly an empty sack caving in on itself. Cannibalizing himself inside to keep it going, keep it all together.

He jogged around a pickup and thumped onto the bridge, shocks flexing, and in the mirror, the Lincoln followed his lead. Traffic, finally, had thinned enough to grant Tony his wish. He was on their tail, grinding bumper to bumper as Justin veered back and forth across both lanes. He turned the Dodge’s fenders to junk on both sides. First the right, on the outer retaining wall, then throwing a slipstream of sparks from the left as it raked along the center divider. Tony pounded them again from behind, and the jolt was enough to cause whiplash.

Too many more like that, and the Aries would be a rolling junkpile.

“Get the rifle out of the back,” he said.

April leaned over the seat and brought it up front, blanket and all. Unwrapped it. He had one hand on it when Tony came bashing forward yet again, and he heard the bumper dropping to the bridge.

Justin fought around another car, then had April take the wheel. She leaned across and gripped it with white-knuckled hands, and Justin pivoted in his seat, foot still jamming the gas, and propped the AK-47 across the seatback. No singleshot action this time; he switched it for full automatic.

The gunfire was agony on the ears inside the tight interior, and the first volley chewed the back window into crystal that avalanched from the frame. The second he centered on the Lincoln’s windshield; Tony got the idea and cut sharply to the side and dropped back. Justin squeezed off anyway, aimed lower at the engine. Sparks pinwheeled off the hood and front quarter panel, and Tony dropped back another twenty yards.

Justin turned to face front again, regained the wheel. Rested the AK-47 beside his leg, muzzle pointing at the roof. It had bought them time, nothing more.

Rolling, rolling. The land disappeared behind them, the last of Tampa. Miles ahead, St. Pete. In between, only this ribbon of bridge. Justin wiped blood and chillsweat from his face.

Overhead, the sky had turned schizophrenic. To the north, day’s last light was breaking through a caul of clouds, a horizon smeared with pink and tainted by an eerie yellow haze.

To the south, it was apocalyptic with clouds as dark as betrayal, and far far away, a jagged trident of lightning speared the sea. A sky at war with itself. He entertained the crazy notion that the eventual outcome would hinge entirely on his own victory or defeat.

Another mile later, he had the sense that his thoughts were not entirely secret. Privy to another.

He locked onto the wheel, wide-eyed, while he found himself experiencing that dizzying plummet through aeons. Began to shake his head,
No, no, no, can’t be feeling this again, not now, NOT NOW!
But protest as he might, he fell prey all over again. His mind swam, his soul reeled. And he recalled Erik’s explanation for the first flashback. The hallucinogen gets into your system, lies dormant in fat cells, can be released later when the cells are broken down. Rationality still held a finger on him, and he knew that with no more than he had eaten lately, little wonder it hadn’t already happened.

Ride it out, ride it out. . . .

The Dodge, hurtling toward destinations he could no longer clearly see. Blind instinct, dumb luck, sheer terror.

April was forgotten, yet he was not alone, in a manner that she had nothing to do with. He was open to some desperate soul clawing pitifully for companionship, and through a green soulstorm he recognized her. . . .

The same one as before, who had pulled him across the city to watch as she fell victim to Tony’s experimentation in some sordid dungeon. And later, as Tony’s twisted love turned to hunger. He felt the anguish of her self-loathing, realized she was incomplete, in fragments. And when he began to wonder where she was coming from, he received a claustrophobic image-sensation of sleeping at the bottom of the sea, where anything with a taste for your waterlogged flesh—or what remained of it—could come in for a nibble.

She’s . . . she’s right
under
us.

Erik had been found floating south of here. Justin felt sick with the realization that this was Mendoza’s watery graveyard for those whom he chewed up and spat out.

Whatever was left of the girl clung to his soul with the frantic urgency of an abandoned child seeking comfort and assurances that she was not alone after all. Confessions, remorse. All at once he understood that she too had played a part in Erik’s final night. She too bore the guilt, and it was digesting what remained of her. Seeking forgiveness and absolution, before nothing was left to burn.

How to finish Tony, it was all he wanted. If she could help, he would light a candle for her wayward soul every day that remained of his life. She did not turn him away.

She filled his head then, so much in so little time. Wherever she was now, in some transcendent Yanomamö realm, or a hell of her own making, she at least was privy to the laws of nature that those who traveled above her overlooked.

The sea.
The answer had surged beneath them all along.

For a moment, all too brief, his mind floated with an image of her as she had been in life; blond, the face of a wanton child. And if two souls can kiss, they did. Just before she said good-bye, for he could divide himself no longer.

And when the green haze cleared, he could see as never before.

They were nearing the three-mile point where the microthin spur of land from the west jutted out to underpin the bridge. Its rocky shoreline was in sight ahead. Behind, Tony was regaining nerve enough to creep closer.

“Okay, son of a bitch,” he muttered out the window, “let’s see what you’re
really
made of.” Then, to April, “Hang on.”

The Dodge was in the inside lane, and he wrenched the wheel to put it in the outside. Jammed both feet on the brakes, and as the Lincoln came squealing alongside to mash doors, Justin one-handed the AK-47 up and out the window. Held the trigger for a burst of fire that ripped through the Lincoln’s fender and engine compartment and coughed out spumes of smoke and steam.

Tony lost control of the Lincoln, and as it lurched back and forth, it squashed the Dodge against the outer retaining wall. Justin slammed the transmission straight into park, brought mechanical anguish from his own engine, and then both cars were spinning into blurs that sent them bowling along the bridge in loops that reduced knees and stomachs to jelly. Justin wrestled the wheel, saw pavement and sea and sky whirl interchangeably. The world was motion gone insane, and shrieks of tires twisted beyond endurance as rubber sprayed into the air. And then . . .

Stillness. Can’t spin forever.

Equilibrium was trapped in a slowing whirlpool. As the two cars sat cockeyed across the bridge in an effective barricade, Justin tried his door, found it wouldn’t open. April wrenched hers open with a metallic groan, and once he’d undone his seat belt, Justin crawled after her and they both spilled onto the bridge. The stink of burnt rubber and antifreeze and hot metal reeked in the air. He stood, shakily, momentarily using the AK-47 like a crutch, and propped himself against a crumpled fender. Saw Tony emerging from the Lincoln some thirty feet back.

Beyond, the cars that had trailed them were slowing, stopping, giving them plenty of distance. Horns were starting to blow already, out here in the middle of the sea, of all places for a traffic jam. In the greater distance, sirens, and the telltale red wash of their beacons. Good luck to the boys in blue, then, because there was no longer room enough to bring up their cars.

“End of the line, numbnuts!” Tony yelled. The victorious glee in his voice was richly unmistakable.

Movement beyond Tony, furtive, the approaching clatter of shoes on pavement. Justin saw blue shirts and badges and a shotgun and figured a couple of the earliest arrivals had abandoned their car to sprint the rest of the way on foot. Passengers in civilian cars ducked into seats, and the cops were planting themselves behind the cover of fenders. Yelling orders. Throw down weapons, faces down on the bridge, all that.

Suicide
, Justin thought.

They opened fire on Tony before he’d gotten all the way back into the Lincoln. He was hit at least twice, then popped back out with something lethal of his own, firing full automatic. The firefight was brief but intense, and glass flew all around the cops, and Justin saw a revolver twirling in the air from a dead hand. Mendoza was shouting, no,
laughing,
laughing as he stalked across open space with a rain of shell casings at his feet, and Justin dared not fire yet for fear the surviving cop deem him as unfriendly as Mendoza. And not nearly as resilient. A moot point, however, as the next of Tampa’s finest was blown back onto the hood of a sedan missing half its windshield.

Tony turned, charged, leaped atop the Lincoln’s ruined hood, and jumped down on their side, narrowing the gap. “Now!” Tony called. “Where were we?”

The skullflush.
Where was it?
He’d meant to bring it— Still on the dashboard. Miracles do happen.

Justin socked the assault rifle into his good shoulder, twitched the trigger enough to blow out the Dodge’s windshield. He reached in and plucked the kilo from a litter of safety glass. The fragments sprinkled away like cheap jewels.

He held the kilo aloft at arm’s length. And Tony stopped, frozen, homing in on it as sharply as a bird dog onto a pheasant.

“Last one in the free white world!” Justin cried. “What’s it worth to you?”

The peal of Tony’s laughter could probably be heard on both shores. He tossed the submachine gun to the bridge, and it clattered behind him as he passed it by. Bloody and utterly unfazed.

“I can be a sport,” Tony said. “Fight you for it!”

“Justin!” April cried, tugging at his arm. “You can’t make deals with him!”

“Go with it, I know what I’m doing,” he whispered to her. Then, to Tony, “Come on, last one! What’s it worth?” Mendoza was all forward motion, confidence, and hunger. Burning. You could read it in his eyes from twenty feet, eighteen . . .

“Better believe her on this one,” he called. “Guess what. I think you just played your last ace in the hole.” Closer still.

Justin brandished the rifle, aimed it along the bridge. Tony stopped. Smiled, his burned and battered face still handsome in its own demented way. There was no denying the charisma. The
hekura
living inside him was probably the greatest single asset to ever agree so totally with him.

Smiling at the muzzle, Tony lifted both hands, displayed the webbing beginning to fill in between his fingers. He ripped apart the remains of his tank top, stood at a cocky pose. Black folds of fabric, tearing over his already-perforated chest. He puffed it out, slapped it with both hands in open display of a perfect target.

“Be my guest.” His voice was starting to roughen.