As Santana and Harris belatedly look away from the cleavage on which the camera lingers, glasses of Macallan Scotch in their right hands, Calaphas acts on his dream. He puts one metal-jacketed round point-blank in Santana’s face, another in Harris’s throat, and he steps around the corner of the island and looks down where they have fallen in sprays of blood and brains and spilled Scotch. Rudy is dead, the architecture of his face remodeled beyond anything Picasso might have imagined. A rasping noise escapes Harris along with blood that spurts between the fingers of the hand that he has clamped to his throat. Calaphas says, “The Hermès jacket is high fashion, but being fashionable is a particularly shallow dream,” and drills him with another round.
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
Aleem doesn’t do bad weather. Snow is cocaine, which he sells, but the real stuff has no appeal for him. Ski gear makes every dude who wears it look like he belongs in an advertisement for stupid pills. To learn the slopes, you’ve got to fall down and make a fool of yourself a few hundred times, and Aleem has too much self-respect for that. The only men who slop around in the rain are those who have no choice, because either they’re job slaves who have to work when it’s wet or they’re under some woman’s thumb, running errands that she won’t do unless the sun is shining and birds are singing, or they’re mental cases who sooner or later are going to drown like turkeys do, just standing in the rain with their mouths open. To Aleem’s way of thinking, when shit is falling out of the sky, the only right places to be are a pool hall, a backroom poker game, a casino with cocktail waitresses who have cleavage worth looking at when the cards aren’t, or in bed with a couple of fresh ladies. Bad things happen to people in bad weather. They slip and fall and end up in a wheelchair, or they take a hit of lightning, or they catch pneumonia and spend weeks coughing up blood or whatever people do when they have pneumonia, because Mother Nature is a mean bitch. Yet here he is out in the storm, slogging through mud, his shoes already ruined, everything he’s wearing destined for a dumpster. And why? Because fourteen years ago, Nina Dozier wanted him so bad that she tricked him into doing her until she could have his baby, and now she wants the boy for her own, as if she made the kid herself, just carved him out of wood and brought him to life like Pinocchio. Aleem is soaked, cold, miserable. He is so pissed at Nina that he’s lost all interest in doing her with Kuba; he just wants to kill her hard but slow, if they can get her someplace dry. He is so angry that he can’t imagine any development that would crank up his rage even further—which is when he and Kuba become human jukeboxes.
His iPhone is safe and dry in a zippered inside pocket of his jacket when music explodes from it at a far greater volume than he has ever before heard the device produce. He is so startled that he stumbles and slips and nearly falls in the mud, and Kuba cries out as if a cold and ghostly hand has grabbed his scrotum. The music is so loud that the phone is vibrating in Aleem’s pocket and quickly growing warm. They’re stalking Nina, listening for any sound of her and the boy that might carry through the whistling wind and drumming rain, while she’s for sure listening for any sound they make, and if this is happening to him and Kuba, it’s probably also happening to their six homeys. He’s now furious, the way he gets when only blood will calm him, not just because some trickster techie is screwing with them, but because the music is, of all things, “Macarena,” by Los Del Río, freakin’ dance music, maybe the longest-running song ever on the charts, nothing hard and street about it, six steps down from the Bee Gees. It’s not bad enough that the music is announcing their position, but it’s also embarrassing.
Aleem zippers open his jacket and reaches inside and zippers open the pocket and extracts the phone and tries to switch it off, but he can’t. The phone won’t shut down, and it won’t let him get out of the music app. And there’s this lame video, pure punk cheese, of idiots in Spanish costumes dancing and grinning, thrashing around a ballroom as if they ought to be foaming at the mouth. He fingers the volume slide, and it moves down, but the music continues to boom into the night.
Kuba is shouting obscenities, agitating his phone as if Los Del Río can be dispensed from it like salt from a shaker. Frustrated, he throws it down in the mud and raises one foot, but he can’t bring himself to stomp on it, maybe because it’s not a cheap burner, but probably also because his contacts include the numbers of ten or twenty fresh ladies, none of which he has committed to memory. Plus he’s got photos on there of some of his best moments, selfies of the part of him that he’s most proud of, taken just as it achieved liftoff, treasured mementos that he’s loath to lose.
There’s no way to save the phones, but it’s a mistake to break them. By way of example, Aleem throws his down next to Kuba’s and turns and shambles away into the wind and rain, toward that section of the orchard where Nina and the kid are most likely to be found. Maybe she’ll assume their position is still defined by “Macarena,” while in fact they’re coming at her from a different direction.
After a moment, Kuba catches up with him, hunched and hooded. “You see this comin’？”
“See what?”
“All this weird shit.”
“What—I’m Nostradamus?”
“How she do that?”
“The phones wasn’t Nina. Neither was the Aviator.”
“How you know?”
“She’s an accountant is all she is, not some genius hacker.”
Aleem shivers. His shirt is wet. He forgot to close his jacket after he got the phone out. He zips it up.
Raising his voice to compete with the wind, Kuba says, “So it’s the boy?”
“The boy don’t have gear for a trick like that.”
“How you know?”
“Nobody has gear for that.”
“Somebody does. You see that video? Man, it sucked.”
“Could make a man go deaf and blind,” Aleem agrees.
They are far enough away from their phones to hear “Macarena” playing elsewhere in the orchard.
“Mockin’ us,” Kuba says. “We find who, I’ll give him a livin’ autopsy.”
Aleem says, “Nina’s got to know who.”
“Man, that music eats your soul,” Kuba says.
“Could be worse.”
“How?”
“Could be Abba.”
“Shit, it could be ‘Dancin’ Queen.’”
“Didn’t I just say?”
EN ROUTE
Southbound at high speed in the Bentley, slaloming lane to lane through traffic that is fast-moving yet slower than he can tolerate, Michael Mace is muttering in frustration at the discrepancy between the astonishing mental powers of his life as a resurrectee and the very human physical limitations to which he remains subjected. When he wishes, he is able to perceive the billions of electromagnetic waves—carrier waves—of data that flow through the intricate webs of wires and glass fibers civilization has spun, that also course through the air from transmitter to transmitter, to receivers beyond counting, passing through buildings and people and trees without any effect, television programs and Zoom conferences that are invisible while in transit, streamed music and cell-phone conversations that cannot be heard until translated from digital code into audible tones. Every river of data will wash him quickly to a computer or a network of computers, most of which are sluiceways that will spill him into the internet. He can be in New York in a few seconds, in Washington or Paris or Beijing, or in a surveillance satellite in orbit above Earth. All the secrets that the world so jealously keeps are not hidden from him. However, to help Nina and John in that damn orchard, he needs to be there in the flesh.