The Shaft (8 page)

    Bauhaus enjoyed his speechmaking. Cruz wondered how many times he'd delivered this one.

    Don't forget that Chicago is still Gangster City USA. A lot of law enforcement in the Southwest still behaves in cowboy terms, yes? Well, a lot of the syndicate heavies here are still convinced this is 1930, and they swing enough clout that nobody's going to hurry to contradict them. So this is a terrific little hamlet for security procedures - authorities don't blink a lid when you install bulletproof windows. You hungry?'

    Cruz's stomach sloshed with acid, and the hunger-kill of the coke had worn off. 'Food would be good… if I could grab a club soda and some Rolaids first.'

    Bauhaus patted his shoulder. 'We have everything.
Attendez vous
.'

    Beyond the glass doors was a large central room designed as an L-shape with the foot bent outward and floor-to-ceiling windows making up the outside corner. Cruz drifted into the pit of the central living room, imagining how a firefight might tear it apart. The lush ebony carpeting on the floor made footing unsure in the dim light. There were three levels: Two steps up to an oval dining area near the windows, two down into a padded circular pit full of built-in sofas and curved tables and inset entertainments. The conversation pit was circumvented by an enameled rail and organized around a gigantic projection TV screen. It reminded Cruz of a large jacuzzi or a very small swimming pool. Tubes of blue neon delineated the steps. Red neon ran the circuit of the entire room at the junctures of floor and ceiling. On the side of the dining area opposite the television was a wrought iron spiral stairway. The play of light off the dark walls indicated a pattern that mimicked the orientation of the neon - alternate slashes of smooth and textured surfaces that dashed around the room like racing stripes on a car. One entire wall featured a row of doors, close together, leading off to other chambers. More center-mounted doorknobs, ornate. The interstices of the doors were Yupped out with fake holes revealing fake brickwork, lit by garish Depression-era theatre sconces.

    Organ music seeped from speakers Cruz could not see. Classical stuff; almost liturgical.

    Bauhaus ignored messages and clattered about the kitchen, seeking imported beer. The kitchen area was offset by a stretch bar, also L-shaped, with onyx countertops, leather stools, and a big brass hurricane lamp mounted at each end.

    The dining room table was two-inch glass. On it Cruz saw at least twelve cartons of Chinese take-out and a couple of pizza delivery boxes. The smell of food almost made him swoon.

    One of the back doorways clicked shut and a woman wandered out to pick pepperonis off a still-steaming pizza. She was not exactly naked. She wore a gauzy wrap that seemed designed for no purpose, except maybe local background color for a sci-fi movie. New World. Against the light from the dining room windows it offered her silhouette in a nimbus of blue. She possessed a round, sassy ass, strong legs, and breasts like two scoops of vanilla with halved cherries at ground zero. She wasn't much taller than five feet and didn't seem to notice Cruz at all. She posed by the window, nibbling a pizza slice. She did not eat the crust. Her blonde hair was unbound, flat as string cheese, butt-length. Cruz tried to imagine Bauhaus on top of her. It would be like a walrus raping a sparrow.

    'One of my executive assistants,' Bauhaus said unnecessarily. His tone pointed her out as property. 'Dumb as lumber.'

    Cruz knew this drill. It was this woman's job to be a toy. Woman, if she was of age, which Cruz doubted. Certainly Bauhaus wouldn't use this nymphet as an arm doily in public. He probably tapped one of her older co-workers. In return, they got to shoot more snow up their snoots than Santa Claus had seen in his lifetime. Nobody forced these people to be sexist caricatures.

    He thought of Chiquita again.

    'Hey, Chari - set us up over here, will ya?'

    Cruz counted seven barstools, and saw that the hurricane lamps flickered with electric fire. The leeward end of the bar was padded leather against burnished black teak. Facing the windows was a hearth of glazed tile big enough to spit-roast a Volkswagen. Concealed vents blew out heat from crackling cedar logs. Diaphanous curtains interrupted the smooth, blank flow of window glass like gossamer pillars. The moving heat stirred them hypnotically.

    Cruz sorted through containers of spicy eggplant and chicken in mustard sauce, napalm-hot. Bauhaus joined him and handed over a bottle of Grolsch. 'So - what do you think of the ranch?'

    Cruz's eyes followed the bouncing Chari. He skipped cost estimates and said, 'A lot of security.' His vision had adjusted enough for him to pick out at least two of the camera eyes lurking over the living room, plus motion sensors dutifully blinking green-to-red whenever somebody moved.

    Was Bauhaus expecting loud compliments? He probably thought Cruz was playing blast too hard.
Impress me? Naah
. He had no way of knowing how stunned Cruz still was. Pure physiochemical shock had not yet waned. The events of that morning were still less than a day distant.

    So he supplied praise himself: 'Yeah, I tell you, kiddo. You and me can sit down, relax, discuss what kind of business arrangements we need to make. We can scope the great view, when it's not so overcast and the snow's not battering the windows. We can swill Veuve Cliquot at a hundred bucks a bottle and Chari will suck our dicks while we count money. And I can videotape it from almost any vantage in the room.'

    'How do you compensate for the light?'

    'That's for the Japs to worry about, not me. Dig in.'

    Cruz lifted a morsel of shredded Szechuan pork to his mouth with chopsticks. 'You sweep for bugs?'

    'Twice a week.' Bauhaus swigged half his bottle of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He had a belly his silk shirt did not care to hide. The belt fighting his waistline had a cast bronze buckle far too big - embossed fighter planes in commemoration of some forgotten World War Two battle. It made Cruz think of Texans.

    'Easy enough to toast outside taps on the phone lines,' Bauhaus went on. 'Govemment-issue sniffers can't penetrate the electrical interference I've set up inside my walls. We modify before the good guys can budget improved equipment. Two jumps ahead, always. The window glass over there has a chemically-disrupted refraction index; that means nobody standing outside can photograph us standing inside.'

    'Like polarized glass.'

    'You got it. And all the guy outside gets is a sheet of gray.' He wolfed a large, drippy bite of kung pao shrimp and chased with a plastic forkful of wok vegetables before the first mouthful was chewed. The greens were swimming in garlic. 'Potential entry areas have vibration trips in the floor. Suspect movement when the house is empty kicks on the video surveillance. I have large, ugly, and very faithful enforcers ninety seconds from either side of the house.'

    The shrimp was good but too peppery. The food began to soothe the steel-spike aspect of Cruz's headache. Time for maintenance.

    Bauhaus conducted him to a large bathroom off one of the guest bedrooms. Here the throb of the neon could finally dissipate. Cruz rifled the cabinets and used a bottle of chilled Perrier to drop a hundred and twenty milligrams of commercial decongestant, five aspirin, two ibuprofen tabs, four Rolaids and a multipak of vitamins. He plugged in extra Vitamin C, plus a B-complex to activate it. His head would turn right in twenty minutes.

    He stood under an extremely hot shower, letting the massage spray pound him. He scrubbed hard and emerged red as a stop sign. Pills sloshed in fizzy water and his stomach invented a rude noise. His feet felt good out of their shoes. Muscle aches that had begun to deep-seat were headed off by the aspirin. He pulled on fresh underwear and socks. His aloha shirt was still wadded up in the Nike bag. He left it there. Bad mojo to re-don that shirt now. It was tiring enough dressing in his other used clothes.

    When he came out, the big video projector was going. Freddy Krueger was chasing dream teens and delivering the blade between one-liners. Cruz stuck to the blander Mandarin dishes, knowing that between the vegetables and the vitamins his urine would come out phosphorescent. Another jailbait snow princess floated out to join them after regaining consciousness in another of the back rooms. This one had brown bangs and heavy, flashy earrings. Stunning eyes, video blue, in a blank china-doll face. Her aspect was feline and sinuous. Bauhaus sure liked his home stock young. She wore a shortie terrycloth bathrobe and did not say anything. According to Bauhaus, her name was Krystal.

    They were always named Krystal. Or Chaka or Suld or Lolabelle or Star or Tanya or Chari. They always wound up overdosed, discarded, burned out. Or off the nearest balcony…

    Chiqui did her trick again in Cruz's mind. Splat.

    Cruz moved closer to the movie. Bauhaus was feeding noodles to the girls. A bean sprout clung to the two-day stubble on his chin; Chari purred and licked it off, chewing lasciviously, her impudent little tits bobbing and weaving with every motion of her aerobicized bod.

    'You ready to perform?' Bauhaus said. He stood and ignited an overpriced Cuban cigar, puffing furiously until an inversion layer of gray hovered in the dining room lights.

    'What you got?'

    Bauhaus jerked his stogie in the direction of the bar, where Chari had set things up as instructed. Three neat pyramids of white powder were arranged on the onyx. Track lamps spotlit them dramatically.

    'Rosie recommends your awesome nose,' Bauhaus said. 'I'd like to see you do your stuff. Do my stuff.'

    Krystal giggled like an axe murderer.

    Cruz quickly scoped the coke. It looked fresh from the brick. Chari had laid out two clean mirrors, some single-edged razor blades, lab spatulas, atomizers, cotton swabs and several cork-stoppered glass vials. It looked as though surgery on an alien lifeform was about to commence at the bar.

    'Door Number One, Door Number Two' Bauhaus enumerated the piles. 'And Puerto Numero Tres.' This time both girls laughed and settled in to watch on either side of him, behind the bar.

    Cruz inhaled through his nose. Both barrels were clear. He raked up a stool and sat, facing off with them.

    'So tell me about this stuff here,' Bauhaus said.

    He took a pinch from the leftmost pile and rubbed it between clean fingertips, dusting most of it back onto the pile. He touched his finger to his tongue-tip.

    'Got distilled water in one of these?' Cruz said, indicating the squeeze bottles.

    Bauhaus nodded. 'Got Vitamin E oil if you want it.'

    'Not yet.' Of the first pile, he said, 'Off hand, I'd place this cut at about forty percent.' Using blade and mirror he chopped a thirty-milligram line exactly two inches long. He looked around until handed a glass straw, and hoovered the flake up his left nostril. He let the mix burn, then cocked and shot an aftersniff, pinching his nostrils shut alternately.

    'It's cut with baby laxative and speed.' Some mystery additive was numbing his nasal tissues; not the anaesthetic freeze of pure coke, but more likely the psychoactive saltiness of procaine or the coffee boost of benzocaine. As blow it was hardly potent enough to raise Cruz's blood pressure. But it would pass on the street. 'Five or six lines at least, to jump start. You sell this stuff to high school kids? Figures. They wouldn't know any better.'

    'Baby lax for babies.' Bauhaus gloated. 'Right… babies?' The bimbettes tittered.

    Cruz used the inhaler to blow back stray particles. He hung fire a moment - rinse cycle - then turned his attention to the middle pile, snorting a sample up his unpolluted nostril.

    'Oh.' He jerked his head back, half-surprised. He sniffed again. Several times. 'Mm. Wow. Purer. Eighty-two percent or better.' He lifted one of the glass vials and uncorked it, smelling to verify Clorox. 'These clean?'

    Bauhaus looked offended. Cruz would not put doctoring test materials past this guy, not on the flavor of the acquaintance they'd shared so far.

    Using one of the petite lab spatulas, Cruz held the vial level and dumped in a pinch of Pile Number Two. It hesitated on the surface, then about half of it began to course downward, a milky tail still linking it to the pooled amount topside. Each particle emitted its own opaque vapor trail. Cruz thought of Magic Rocks. A few grains veered off and wandered through the bleach like an errant platoon of spermatozoa. That was the cut - probably pseudocoke. It beat the real stuff to the bottom of the vial. Pseudocoke was reputed to stump the bleach test. Cruz knew better. It was generally marketed as incense, its mix granting it the legendary status of being a 'legal' alternative to cocaine. Same junk as the first pile, only more artfully mixed, with a higher degree of bonafide blow.

    Some people would snort fucking incense.

    'This is pure enough to bring two, three times what you probably charge for this shit over here.' He grabbed the inhaler again, repeating his routine.

    The teacher approved. Bauhaus nodded, making puppy noises as he stroked his party babes. One of Chari 's breasts had become undraped, and Bauhaus was squeezing it so the large brown nipple strained in Cruz's direction. His free hand slithered into Krystal's robe, to ditto.

    Cruz ignored the sordid grade school shit taking place within two feet of his eyes and took on the last pile of powder. Bauhaus had begun his mindfuck: Beat the Expert. Or distract him, if your coke mix isn't subtle enough.

    Somebody moaned. The drug-enhanced cycle of autopilot passion had commenced.

    Pile Three turned out to be some creative twist on coke-plus, the nasal equivalent of a mixed cocktail. Yes, Bauhaus' pure coke base was impressive. Here it was cut about seventy-thirty with either ground-up Demerol or Methaqualone. The combo of coke and ludes was supposed to interbalance, cutting the sharp edges off the coke boost and replacing it with a high in another direction. Like popping barbiturates to ease off speed.