Devil's Breath, page 10
He doesn’t belong here, this guy, on this dark beach with animals like us. But here he is. Here we all are.
I drop an elbow on him. Hard. Breaks his glasses in two and splits the skin just above his left eye. He cries out and brings his hands to the wound, but it’s already spurting blood all over the place. I stand in time to miss most of it, but a bit sprays across the front of my jeans.
“Please,” he cries. “No more—please—I-I’ll take care of it, I promise, I…”
I nod, even though he can’t see me through the blood and darkness. A part of me sees myself—sometimes even my mother—when I look at these slobs, and I wonder why I don’t help them. Shouldn’t I know better? Shouldn’t I be the guy that doesn’t hurt people? I don’t want to, never felt good about it, but I’m to a point where I don’t feel anything, and maybe that’s the problem. Like when my old man pounded away on me, eventually I didn’t feel a goddamn thing. Hunter or hunted, makes no difference.
Back on the ridge overlooking the beach, Johnny Fitz and Fenway Dave stand watching me, waiting. There’s more drugs to do, more drinks to be had, plenty of forgetting and numbing to do. In a few years they’ll both be dead. Dave dies in the street before an ambulance can get to him, gunned down outside a bar by the husband of some woman he was running around with. A year later Johnny gets sent to Walpole for a double murder he and another guy pull while robbing an underground casino in Chinatown. He dies in prison a month later when another inmate shanks him in the shower, cashing in on the contract the Chinese mob put out on him for raiding their game and killing two of their own.
And me? I think I escape, swear I’ve found salvation—and maybe I do—only to have it ripped from my grasp with as little mercy as I show this poor fuck and the rest we deal with. Never killed anyone. Came close but stopped just short, and at the point where it was either move through those gates or go the other way, I made what most would say was the right move.
Doesn’t matter where I go or even who I am from there, though. Those old ghosts never die. Can’t kill what’s already dead. I feel them moving under my skin and always will, gnawing at my bones like the ravenous cannibals they are. It’s all inside me, a bad dream I never wake up from.
So I go blind instead.
The past fades to black, where it belongs.
* * *
I don’t know how long I sat out there, but eventually a pair of headlights cut the night and turned at the top of the street. They were followed by a second. The first was Chic’s van, the second a dark sedan. The van pulled into the space in front of his address, the second stopped in the middle of the street. The van’s driver-side door opened and a man got out. It wasn’t Chic but some other guy I couldn’t make out in the dark. He walked over to the sedan and got in the back just as the front side door of the car opened and a dark form tumbled out and rolled to the curb.
Even before the person regained his feet and revealed himself to be Chic, the door was pulled closed and the car sped off, passing by me and turning the corner at the end of the block before vanishing into darkness.
In my rearview, I saw Chic start up a side staircase toward his apartment.
He wasn’t paying much attention to his surroundings, probably still caught up in whatever had happened to him earlier, none of which could’ve been good, so I hopped out of the car and hurried along the sidewalk until I was directly across from his building. By the time I got there he was halfway up the staircase and headed for the door to the third-floor apartment.
There was no way to ascend the rickety wooden staircase quietly, so with a deep breath, I grabbed the railing and charged up the stairs as fast as I could.
I was still quite a distance from him when Chic heard me coming. It was dark and he hadn’t left an outside light on so I couldn’t see him that well and knew he couldn’t make me out either.
As he fumbled with his keys in an attempt to get inside, I pushed myself up those stairs until I’d reached him. Chic had the keys in the door and had just started to push his way in when I closed on him, slamming into him from behind with such force we both stumbled inside. He lost his balance and nearly fell, catching himself at the last moment on the edge of a counter. I closed the door behind us, and just as he spun around, I pulled the gun and leveled it at him. There was enough moonlight through the windows over the nearby sink to reveal what I was pointing at him.
“Fuck is this?” he said, breathing heavy, hands raised.
“Turn a light on,” I said, equally out of breath.
Chic reached for a wall switch, and suddenly a modest kitchen appeared around us. His face fell when he recognized me. “Fuck, man, not you.”
“Afraid so, Chic.” I motioned with the gun. “Weapons on the counter.”
“I ain’t packin’,” he said.
I didn’t trust anyone wearing a jacket in this heat, even a lightweight Members Only deal like he had on and I hadn’t seen in years. “Lose the jacket.”
Chic shook his head and carefully removed his jacket, peeling it back with one hand to his shoulders, then shaking it off until it fell to the floor, wincing throughout. When his other hand came into view, I realized why. He’d wrapped it haphazardly with what looked like a strip of fabric torn from perhaps a T-shirt, but the odd angles of his first three fingers left no doubt that they’d been broken, likely snapped one at a time.
“We alone, or is there a Mrs. Chic?”
“Just you and me, sweet pea.”
“Have an accident?” I asked.
“Eat shit.”
“You should go to the hospital.”
“Fuck off, ace.”
“Who did that to you?”
“Why don’t you get the fuck out of my house? How about that?”
“Why’d they break your fingers, Chic?”
He looked like he might burst into tears. His fear was that raw. “You’re gonna get me killed, boss. You’re gonna get us both killed. That what you want?”
“What I want is information. And you’re going to give it to me.”
“I got neighbors. I make enough noise, they’ll call the fuzzy bears.”
“You’re not going to make any noise, Chic.”
“No?”
“No.” I lowered the gun, and with my free hand pulled out one of the two chairs at the kitchen table. “Sit down.”
He fidgeted about. “I don’t—I don’t want to sit down.”
I stared at him. Whatever fight he may have had in him had already been beaten out of him, and we both knew it.
Chic slowly sank down into the chair, holding his damaged hand by the wrist. The broken fingers were still trembling occasionally. He wouldn’t look at me, and I couldn’t blame him.
“You’ve already had a bad night,” I told him. “Doesn’t have to get worse, but that’s up to you, understand?”
He nodded.
I snagged a dishtowel hanging from the oven handle and threw it at him.
“Come on, chief,” he said through nervous laughter. “I—I didn’t even get a chance to answer anything yet, I—what do you—”
“You know the routine,” I said.
He looked at me with such fear and pleading in his eyes I almost forgot the whole thing and left. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I had to.
“Please,” he said in an uncharacteristically soft voice. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, I—what I’m saying is, I—I’ll cooperate, okay?”
“I know you will,” I said sadly.
There was no way out, and he realized that now. He’d been through this kind of thing before. Better to get it over with soon as he could and hope for the best. I pointed to the table and his face twisted into a grimace. With his good hand, Chic stuffed the towel into his mouth, then slammed shut his eyes.
I wasn’t sure I still had the stomach for such things, but I had to establish pain first. There was no other way to do it. You introduced pain as a way of letting him know what was waiting for him whenever he didn’t cooperate. The threat was one thing, but there was no substitute for getting an actual taste of it.
You begin there and hope that’s where it ends.
Chic put his mangled hand on the table.
I flipped the pistol around like a hammer, handle down, and slammed it onto his broken fingers. His cries were muffled by the towel, as was the whimpering that followed. His body rocked and shook a moment, head down, chest heaving, and then slowly, he became still and raised his head. His face was bright red, eyes brimming with tears and his hand shaking violently but still held in place on the table.
I nodded, granting him permission to remove his hand.
With another whimper, he let his hand slide back into his lap. I pulled the towel from his mouth and tossed it on the table. “Who broke your fingers?”
“Same people you trying to get to.”
“Why?”
“Fucked up when I tailed you.” He hung his head. “Wasn’t supposed to get caught. They didn’t want to be known…yet.”
“Do you know what happened to me Thursday night?”
“Yeah, but I’m fringe, man, I—I ain’t nobody, you dig?”
“Who are you? Who are these people?”
Chic’s bloodshot eyes darted to the door as if he expected them to come bursting through it at any second. “Nobody you want to know.”
“Why can’t I remember you or the others? Why don’t I remember going to the ATM and emptying my account?”
The way he looked at me, I’d have sworn that at that moment he felt sorry for me. “You think this is about a fucking robbery?” he asked in a loud whisper. “You got no idea what’s happening.”
“Answer me,” I said. “Why don’t I remember?”
“Because with him anything is possible.”
“Who?”
Chic was consumed with such sorrow it stopped me dead. “The Devil.”
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Despite the stifling heat in the apartment, a shiver spider-walked up my spine. “You’re gonna have to do better than that, Chic.”
“They brought him to you, let him breathe all over you.”
“No riddles.”
Chic dripped sweat and looked even more unhealthy and pasty in the wash of fluorescent kitchen light. “They’ll kill me,” he said. “Kill me, you dig?”
“You gonna make me hurt you again?”
He shook his head, licked his lips and looked down at the floor. “You don’t understand what you’re dealing with, boss.”
“Neither do you.”
“You think my life means anything to them? You think yours does?”
“Nobody needs to know I was even here, Chic.”
“They’ll know.”
“How?”
“They’re the wind. Everywhere. Nowhere.”
I pulled the other chair out from the table, set it across from him and sat down, gun still in hand. “So what are these people, some sort of Devil freaks or something? A cult, what?”
“Ain’t that simple.” Chic moved like a caged animal, twitching and trembling, but he remained seated. “They’re a part of something dark as shit, but—but it’s not like that.”
“What’s it like then?”
He sighed. It was a sigh of defeat and submission. “It okay if I have a butt?”
“You can have a smoke when we’re done.”
“I know, I could use it as a weapon, right? I won’t. You got my word, chief. I just really need a cigarette. Please, man.”
I stood, retrieved his jacket from the floor and rummaged through the pockets until I found a pack of Lucky Strikes and a Zippo. I dropped the jacket back to the floor, selected a cigarette from the pack and stuck one in his mouth. After tossing the pack on the table, I flipped open the Zippo and held the flame for him as he inhaled and got the cigarette going.
“Thanks,” he said quietly, the cigarette held between his lips.
I snapped shut the lighter, placed it on the table next to the cigarettes and sat down, facing him again. “Talk.”
“Ever heard of the Borrachero tree?”
“No.”
“It only grows in Colombia,” Chic explained. “Has a plant on it called brugmansia. They call it The Devil’s Breath ‘cause it makes something called Scopolamine. It’s a drug. It’s legit all over the world, they use it to treat Parkinson’s disease and shit like that. Thing is, see, in a raw form it turns people into fucking zombies. They take the flowers or leaves of the Borrechero tree and boil them, and then once they’re liquefied, they can slip it into somebody’s drink or put it in their food, dig? They grind it into a powder too. You blow that shit in somebody’s face, it’s instant personal zombie time.” He puffed his cigarette, exhaled through his nose. “Game over, baby.”
As I turn, a face explodes from the darkness and lunges for me…
“What do you mean by zombie?”
A demon—a witch—blows into its open palm…
“The Devil’s Breath, chief.”
Disperses a cloud of mist that sprays my face…
“Wipes away free will,” Chic continued. “You do anything they tell you to do. No arguments, no resistance. Whatever they say, you do.”
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know how or why it works, but it does. Sounds like bullshit, I get it, only it’s not. They been using it in Colombia for years to rob people, rape chicks, whatever. Mostly used by scumbag street shit, even hookers use it down there on johns to get them to empty their bank accounts or run up their credit cards. And the best part is you wake up the next day with a giant hangover but don’t remember shit. Just pieces, and that’s if you’re lucky.”
“And these people, they have access to this drug and used it on me?”
“Yeah, but…”
“But what?”
“The Devil’s Breath they got ain’t like the shit down in Colombia, brother.” Chic took another pull on his cigarette, still leaving it in his mouth. “You hear what I just told you? You think something that powerful, something that can do that kind of shit to people is gonna stay a drug for street thugs down in South America forever? Fucking military and government types got ahold of it. But some private groups did too. Financed by the elite, they did their work on it in labs, came up with something even better. A stronger version, part original drug and part synthetic, dig it? This one’s worse than the original, more powerful. It wipes the memory clean in almost every victim. It’s better than the original, ‘cause with the original, now and then the memory loss wears off, right? But with this new breed it stays gone in almost everybody. It breaks down the resistance even longer. Total control, boss, total control, you see?”
I stood up and pushed my chair back to the table. I needed to move. I needed fresh air, needed to clear my head. “And these people have this stronger version?”
Chic nodded, reached up with his good hand and plucked what was left of the cigarette from his mouth. “You got to be careful how you use it. Shit can be lethal if you don’t know what you’re doing. A gram of the original stuff can kill up to fifteen people, man, and that’s some serious shit. Same amount of the new strain can ice twice that many. That’s the stuff they used on you, bro.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You were chosen.”
“Chosen? Chosen for what, why me?”
“I don’t know, man. I’m nobody, baby, you got to understand that.”
I thought a moment, letting it all sink in as I tried to make sense of the vague traces of memory I had about that night. They weren’t dreams or strange visions after all. It really had happened. They’d blown this drug in my face and I’d inhaled it, gotten it in my eyes and mouth, where it was absorbed into my bloodstream and turned me into a slave to their every whim.
“When they were done with you, they dumped you back on the street and told you to go home. And like a good little zombie, you did. Best part is people on it don’t act like they’re drugged. They seem normal. Maybe a little relaxed but still them, dig it? Look like them, sound like them, the whole nut. Understand now why you can’t remember nothing and had the worst hangover of your life the next morning, big daddy?”
“So they hit me with this shit on my way home from work,” I said. “Then they take me to the ATM and tell me to empty my bank account…”
“Devil was breathing all over you, baby.”
“But it’s not about robbery,” I reminded him. “That’s what you said.”
Chic nodded.
“What then?”
“Ones behind the curtain, the wizards, they don’t care about your money.”
“And who are the wizards?”
Chic raised his cigarette. It was almost gone. “Need to put this out, boss.”
I motioned to a plastic ashtray on the table. He leaned forward and crushed the butt, then sat back, holding his bad hand by the wrist again.
“Who are they?” I asked again.
Chic was nervous and not hiding it well. “It ain’t that easy.”
“Why not?”
“Because it ain’t, brother man, I—you got to understand, it’s—this isn’t like some little group of losers fucking with people. It goes a lot deeper than that, it’s—it’s bigger, you dig? It’s bigger than either of us knows.”
“Fine,” I said, “then let’s start with who you work for.”
“I don’t work for nobody. I’m a free agent.”
“Who hired you to tail me?”
“It’s not about hiring. It’s a debt owed. It’s about blood.”
“You’re testing my patience, Chic, and you’re making me very angry.”
“No, no, hold up, hold up. I ain’t nobody, dig? I’m way down, boss, strictly minor leagues. I hang around, I try to learn, but I’m not even really in with them, not—not yet.”
“In with who?”
He didn’t answer. Keeping the gun down by my leg, I backhanded him across the mouth with my other hand. Quickly. Savagely. Chic’s head snapped back, and he let out a groan, but he stayed seated and clutching his wrist.
