After Death(36)
“Four twins.”
“You get what I’m sayin’?”
“With some effort.”
“Get it outta your head how Woodbine’s just some mouthpiece you can keep waitin’ while you have port. I don’t work for no pocket-change pussy. The man is on the ladder, not just on it, high up.”
“Good for him. Good for you. Look, I’m sorry. It’s been a long day, that’s all.”
Although of a style different from that of seventeenth-century France, the lobby rivals the Hall of Mirrors in the palace at Versailles as an effort to impress on commoners that he who resides here has pockets deeper than the sea.
The elevator is accessed with a code that Santana enters in a keypad. The cab rises in silence, so smoothly that they don’t seem to be moving.
“Respect gotta be paid,” Santana says.
“I won’t embarrass you,” Calaphas assures him.
This will be a far more interesting meeting than Calaphas has expected. That understanding comes to him not as a premonition; it has become his considered intention to make it interesting.
VIEWPOINTS
Sometimes, Aleem is too enthusiastic for his own good. He knows this. He is profoundly self-aware. He is a get-it-done guy who has no patience for the hindrances of the world. The worst hindrances are people, and he has killed more of them than he should have. He doesn’t regret excessive murder or think it is immoral. Nothing is immoral unless you believe it is, and even if you believe something is immoral, you’re wrong. That’s Aleem Sutter’s philosophy. When he admits to having killed more people than he should have, he’s only acknowledging that sometimes offing a treacherous buttface isn’t worth the risk involved. If he better managed his enthusiasm, he would on some occasions do nothing more than cripple the dude for life or, if the hindrance loves his mother, Aleem would be better advised to just disfigure the bitch and threaten to waste her to keep her little mama’s boy in line. The ecstasy, the overpowering exaltation, of shooting an adversary in the face or spilling his guts on his shoes can, if Aleem’s not careful, spin quickly into a frenzy, such delirious excitement that he might make a big mistake. He knows that he must guard against healthy enthusiasm deteriorating into frenzy. He is more self-aware than anyone he has ever known.
At the moment, as he urges Kuba to ram the Explorer, he knows that his anger at Nina has swollen into rage and that rage can sour enthusiasm into the most violent and least wise of intentions. But what he feels is not his fault. She’s making him this way. She takes the boy and runs, and then she doesn’t just give up at the roadblock like she ought to, and now she’s forcing them to chase her through this zombie forest. It’s as if, right in front of his homeys, she keeps telling him that she’s going to cut his pecker off, or as if she thinks she has essentially already cut it off, humiliating him.
She makes the situation even worse by handling the Explorer as if she went to some Hollywood school for stunt driving and graduated at the top of her class. Except for clipping the right rear fender on a tree trunk, she’s pumping that four-wheel so expertly that Kuba not only is failing to catch up with her, he’s beginning to fall farther behind.
“Don’t let this happen,” Aleem warns.
“Everythin’ is everythin’, boss.”
Everything isn’t all right, and the fact that Kuba calls him “boss” is proof that the ass-kisser knows it.
“You want a piece of that quiff,” Aleem says, “better catch her soon. Longer it takes, more likely I’ll break her neck ’fore you can strip her down for action.”
“I’m up for that,” Kuba says.
“Up for that? Up for what?”
“Do what you need, then so will I, just so she’s still warm.”
“Man, you’re spookier than dead trees.”
Grinning, Kuba admits, “I got my ways.”
In the passenger seat, John sits at attention, the phone a rectangle of light in his hands. “What’s Michael doing?”
“Saving us.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“You’ll see.”
“Nothing’s happening.”
“Only been a minute since he answered our post.”
“‘The ninth hour.’”
“Is it ever.”
The vast orchard seems to span a burnt-out world, the black and haggard trees with their tortuous rickrack of branches standing to monument the death of humanity in a last war of all against all, the gangbangers’ SUVs like robotic scourges prowling the aftermath to eradicate remaining survivors. Nina has never been so terrified as she is now. These barren but ordered woods evoke horrors as diverse as scenes in a James Cameron movie and Golgotha falling into midday darkness. Yet in peril, as also in loss and grief, she sees, as she always does, moments of strange beauty. Sweeping light silvers the water streaming down black bark. The air is briefly but richly diamonded with wind-tossed raindrops. For a moment, the twigwork of backlit branches seems to form logograms that float in the air with mystical meaning, like comforting messages in some language that she has known in a previous life and will know again in a life to follow this one. Some might say that it’s a fault—but she thinks it is a gift—to perceive beauty and the hope that it represents in even the ugliest moments of life.