“I lose it, man. My homeys bein’ torn up and him runnin’ to save his skinny ass. So I go after him.”
“What else a good man gonna do?” Antoine says.
“Nothin’ else,” Orlando says. “So I take him down, I’m standin’ over the fucker, him dead—and I realize all the shootin’ stopped. No fool left to be killed but me.”
“So fast.”
“Blitzkrieg, man. So I hump outta there.”
“Where you now?”
“Comin’ home.”
“Where Nina?”
“Wherever she figures no one can find her. You know what?”
“What?”
“I don’t give a shit where she gone. This Aleem’s mess, not hers. Don’t you think?”
“She nothin’ to me,” Antoine agrees. “No time to find her, jack her up, when our own roof comin’ in on us. But right now it ain’t my decision.”
“Will be, we throw in together for the sake of Masud, Speedo, and the others. Got to close ranks now, focus. Most homeys known for a while how it ought to be you, not Aleem.”
“That why you call me ’stead of someone else?”
“Exactly why.”
“How long till you be here?”
“Your place—three hours. Maybe less.”
“We got the night to get down how it happened.”
Orlando adds, “And how it gonna be.”
“Break it to the homeys before tomorrow’s news.”
“Way I see it,” Orlando says, “everything is everything.”
“Everything is everything,” Antoine agrees.
“We all gonna be a better team than how we were.”
“That be truer than true. One more thing.”
“I’m here.”
“Sorry about Masud, bro. Must be hard, your main man.”
“Comes with the life,” Orlando says. “We know what price we might gotta pay to be free like we are.”
They terminate the call.
After taking time to review the conversation, comfortable with every exchange between him and Antoine, Orlando gets out of the Aviator, kneels beside it, takes a deep breath, and slams the right side of his face into the back door. The pain is bad enough to be reassuring, but he repeats the act. There’s good blood, although no facial bones are broken. By the time he gets to Antoine’s place, the bruising will be extensive. For a coward, Aleem had a hard punch.
TILT
The blinking signifier on the screen of the iPhone, in the cup holder of the agency sedan, remains stationary mile after mile. Why Michael Mace has stopped in a rural area of San Diego County and whether he has settled there for the night, Durand Calaphas cannot know. His concern is that Mace, given the unknowable powers that the Singularity has conferred on him, might discover the compartment under the back seat and then the hollowed-out brick of twenties in which the transponder is concealed. Calaphas must find the fugitive before the man knows that an agent of the ISA is close on his tail, and put a few bullets in his altered brain before he realizes he is in imminent danger.
Calaphas is little more than half an hour from Mace’s position when the rain ceases falling and the Bentley is on the move again, bearing away its millions of dollars along with the most wanted man in the game. It’s annoying that Calaphas is no longer closing the distance between him and his quarry. Looking on the positive side, however, for whatever purpose Mace had stopped, it had not been because he searched the Bentley to confirm a sudden suspicion that it was carrying an active transponder.
All will be well. Calaphas is confident that all will be well. He will never be reduced to such penury that he will need to go begging to his tedious parents, Ivor and Phyllis. He will never be dragooned into serving as a director of one—or all three—of their funeral homes, condemned to the solemn and stifling atmosphere of grief-counseling rooms and coffin-sales rooms and viewing rooms, a world of thick carpets and velvet drapes hushing away all sounds that might distract from mourning. The thick fragrance of roses and other flowers had cloyed in his nostrils so that at times he felt he must be suffocating. Having grown up, with his brother Gifford, in the apartment above the largest of the three operations, every night “our quiet and respected guests” were at rest in the basement or in ground-floor chambers, already made up and dressed to star in their pre-burial coming out the following morning or being preserved prior to costuming for a command performance the day after tomorrow. Even as oppressive as that environment had been, Calaphas acknowledges, because of the place, at the age of seven, he came to understand that a great destiny awaited him.
Halloween, back in the day. After a well-rewarded evening of trick-or-treating, he falls into bed exhausted at nine o’clock. He wakes two and a half hours later, insomnolent on a lingering sugar high, still much excited by the paraphernalia of the holiday. Black cats, bats, witches on flying brooms, caped vampires, jack-o’-lanterns with candle-flame eyes, ghosts, ghouls, and monsters in infinite variety! Supernatural threats can cast a strangely romantic thrall upon a boy, especially a boy of his high intelligence and uniquely angled mind. Shortly before bed, an elderly man who died from a massive stroke had been brought from the hospital as Durand and his brother were stuffing themselves with chocolate. Gifford dared Durand to meet at midnight and descend into the basement, to the cold-holding chamber adjacent to the embalming room, to spend the witching hour with the deceased. Forbidden from venturing into that place other than in the company of their father or mother, Durand declined. Because of his refusal, he was mocked by Gifford. Now, awake at eleven thirty, he feels it necessary to prove himself by going into the basement alone.
Barefoot and in pajamas, with but a penlight and the ambient glow of the city that pales the windows, carrying a single foil-wrapped Hershey’s Kiss for a special purpose, he makes his way down through the funeral home, into the basement, a realm that always seems vast to him. The cold-holding room—which Gifford sometimes calls the “meat locker” when their parents can’t hear—has a white ceramic-tile floor. In fact everything therein is either white or matte-finished stainless steel. Normally, the room itself isn’t as arctic as it is this night. In one wall, three refrigerated morgue drawers can accommodate quiet and respected guests. Death is busy this Halloween; two drawers contain deliveries. Because the third drawer isn’t functioning properly, the temperature of the chamber itself has been set low enough to cause Durand’s breath to feather from him in frosty plumes. The eighty-five-year-old man, concealed beneath a sheet, is on a gurney in the center of the room. Father and his team of technicians will set to work at 5:00 a.m., and all viewings and funerals will be conducted precisely on schedule.
This is a windowless space, and after young Durand closes the door and turns on the overhead fluorescent panels, he switches off his penlight. He is very cold and somewhat uneasy, but he is stone determined to hide the Hershey’s Kiss where his father won’t likely find it, so that tomorrow he can tell Gifford where it is and thus prove he has been here. He opens a cabinet door and drops to his knees and tucks the candy behind bottles of whatever, farther back than anything the embalmers and cosmeticians might need for the work that currently awaits them.