After Death(56)
“What temple?” Speedo asks.
“Don’t matter what temple. Important thing is David been taught a moral lesson.”
At Whole Fruit, Jason, Hakeem, and Carlisle are waiting just outside the big opening that once was filled by a roll-up door. When Jason directs his light at what they found beyond the threshold, Kuba declares, “No tooth fairy left it. Bitch is here somewhere.”
Aleem can almost feel her head in his hands, his thumbs pressing through the warm jelly of her eyes.
LUCKY
The darkness is so thick that it seems to have substance. Nina feels it pressing on her, coiling in her ears. The air is oily with this darkness, as though it leaves a residue in her lungs when she exhales.
Now and then, she thinks she hears voices, ordered packets of sound different from the wind howl and rain chatter that is muffled by the walls of the packing plant. These moments of suspected human presence do not seem to issue from within this building. They’re as brief as they are faint, like voices from some nameless Beyond that you might expect to hear at a séance. Time passes without the storeroom door being thrown open.
John is afflicted with allergies, and the environment here challenges his determination to be silent. The poor kid stifles a sneeze and minutes later another, perhaps clamping his hands over his face or pinching his nose—God forbid that it happens if one of Aleem’s homeys does step into the room—and both times he whispers, “Sorry,” and she whispers, “It’s okay.”
Maybe ten minutes pass, and he makes a furtive sound, which must have been his hand digging in a coat pocket, because then he blows his nose discreetly. Following a silence without an apology, he reveals a problem in a voice so soft that she strains to hear him.
“Oh no. It’s gone.”
She whispers, “What?”
He barely breathes his reply: “The lucky hundred.”
For a moment, his words don’t compute for her, but then she remembers. In the kitchen. Before they fled their home. He pulled one bill from a bundle, examining it with wonder. It’s real. He tucked the banded hundreds into interior pockets of his jacket, but he folded the loose hundred into an exterior pocket. It’s like a lucky penny ten thousand times over. Maybe the same pocket where he had kept folded Kleenex. Now it must be in the water around them.
“Forget it,” she whispers. “We have so much more.”
After a freighted silence, he says, “Maybe I didn’t lose it here.”
He’d first blown his nose when they stepped into the building, just inside the threshold.
“The wind will have carried it away,” she assures him.
“Maybe not.”
“The wind will have taken it,” she insists.
THE BITTER BITE
He takes the turn at considerable speed, the heavy Bentley pressing to the pavement as though it possesses a gravity greater than that attendant to all other things on Earth. In the sudden turning, its bright beams slap across the trunks and lower branches of the leafless grove ranked on the elevated land. The trees twitch as if physically struck and shuddered by the light, and then fall away into darkness as the headlamps align with the slick blacktop straightaway on which glittering raindrops dance like spilled diamonds.
Michael’s shadow self lives in the nanotech that webs every cell in his body, and those skeins are woven into the spectrum of data-bearing electromagnetic waves that is the worldwide web of the internet and all the computers connected to it. As the car slows with the barren orchard on both sides, a stylized and luminous compass appears in the upper-right quadrant of his vision. This signal seeker leads him not by indicating magnetic north, but by pointing toward the transponder in Nina’s smartphone.
He pulls onto the shoulder of the road and puts the sedan in park and switches off the lights and wipers. He shrugs into the thigh-length Helly Hansen rain jacket that belonged to someone at the house in which he’d meant to spend a few days, a respite upended by the mad-dog gangbanger, Aleem. Zippered pockets accommodate the three spare magazines for the rifle as well as a box cutter that he found in a desk drawer in the Corona del Mar residence. He pulls up the hood and secures it under his chin with the Velcro strap. When he checks the mirrors, the road behind him, to the north, is dark and at the moment untraveled. He kills the engine, retrieves the AR-15, and gets out into the storm.
The door is open, and he is behind it. When he looks over the top to be sure no traffic is coming from the south, he sees someone approaching, forty or fifty feet away. The guy is tall, wearing a full-length black raincoat with a deep hood concealing his face. He’s a medieval figure, like a mendicant monk on a pilgrimage to ancient Rome, who has crossed half a world and a thousand years from one step to the next. He isn’t on the shoulder of the highway, but he walks in the middle of the southbound lane. He calls out, “Need help there, mister? She break down on you?”
It isn’t his shadow self’s high-tech analytic capability that warns Michael of danger. It is the profound intuition with which he was born, an unshakable recognition of evil. This stranger is not a generous Samaritan venturing into foul weather and darkness with the hope of doing a kindness for someone. Nevertheless, Michael isn’t capable of opening fire on the man without being certain of his intentions. Besides, the crack of the rifle will carry far even through the cry of wind and sizzle of rain, announcing his presence to others of Nina’s pursuers sooner than is ideal. He raises his voice above the storm, and by his words he asserts both that he knows what’s happening here and that he has been called to assist. “I’m looking for Aleem.”