Mortality Bridge (49 page)

The cabbie lights another cigarillo. “Hiya, Sparky. TGIF, huh?”

The Driver only looks at the jar. Experimentally Niko slowly lifts it. The Driver’s head tilts up. Niko lowers the jar and moves it out to the side. The Driver’s head tilts down and swivels slightly.

“Hey, how’s my ride?” calls Niko. “Sure is fun to drive, isn’t she? Handles like a dream.” He smiles. “Man, I fired her up and that bitch just opened up for me and purred.”

The eyeless gaze no longer on the jar.

“You know for a while I wasn’t even sure who was driving who. It’s a shame I had to smash her all to hell—”

A sound escapes the Driver that could not issue from a human throat. Keening and choppy and thin. Chihuahuas bark from the plastic surgeon’s estate next door. In the hills coyotes yip. The Driver shucks all pretense of patience and stalks toward Niko with cold murder on his jaundiced face.

Niko says Go.

Nikodemus sprints to the wall and jumps high and hoists himself over. His shredded wings flutter as he drops to the other side.

Niko hands the jar off to the cabbie and hurries limping toward the Driver. He veers around the Driver and makes straight for the Black Taxi where he jerks open the heavy suicide door and jumps inside and slams the door. He yanks the key from the ignition as the door is snatched open behind him.

While the Driver goes for Niko the cabbie calmly goes to the gate and hands the jar through to Nikodemus, and the demon dashes with it up the lighted drive.

Niko scrambles across the seat and gets the door open just as something grabs his ankle. He kicks out blindly and does not connect but frees his leg and tumbles headfirst from the car. He manages a halfassed shoulder roll on the driveway. Sharp pain in his side like a woodrasp drawn across his broken rib. He stands and then falls back against the open door which hits the Driver hot behind him.

Nikodemus opens the front door of Niko’s house and runs inside.

Slouched against the closed car door Niko glances at the cabbie and she calmly nods. Behind him the window rolls down and sudden fire rips across his back. The world whites out. Niko gasps and the gasp locks up. Don’t you dare fall. He jerks forward and sees the ignition key in his hand. A hot iron pierces his back when he flings the key away. The key arcs into the darkness and lands in someone’s yard downhill.

Now you can fall.

Niko falls. The opening car door nudges him. He digs in his heels. Aware of the open window just above his head. His ass grows warm. What’s that about? Oh. Blood flowing down his back. Well this sure can’t last. Come on bud. Get up stand up, like Bob Marley said.

Niko manages to stand. He pushes from the Franklin and turns around just as the door bursts open and the Driver bursts out. Niko backpedals but the Driver stops in front of him and puts a friendly arm around his shoulder and draws him close as a lover and Niko is so startled by this that he lets him. Lets him draw his gaze up slowly into the churning horror of those evershadowed eyes. He half expects a smell of fetid breath but there is no breath at all. He hears the cabbie shouting out, his name perhaps, but his true name is seldom spoken anymore upon the mythless earth. And Niko does not turn he does not hear he does not fight but only looks into that borderless and leeching face and feels a softening inside, of life of will of want, and he senses the Driver’s hand upon his chest, then senses it within his chest and rummaging there for some forgotten thing made consequential only by its perceived absence, by its need to be reclaimed and redeemed, and Niko is about to tell the Driver that what the sure and probing fingers seek is no longer there. Was bartered for a song and sold too cheaply many years ago.

Just about to gently say these things he stops. His breath taken from him as the alien fingers brush the very thing inside him he has never truly believed existed. Never despite evidence and experience felt was really there to sell or trade.

The Driver seizes Niko’s soul and pulls. Not hard. Not hard. Instead he coaxes teasing Niko’s soul from its asylum like a loose thread in a pattern. His nimble fingers are not cold at all.

Yes thinks Niko as he looks into that jaundiced faceless face. o yes I will go with you. Take me with you, strip me from the prison of my flesh. Take me fuck me o it feels so good to die like this I love you.

He feels his soul enjoined more fully than it ever was with Jemma in their most heated passion or quiet certain love. Stripped down to his foundation he shares—with the Driver! with the Driver!—a naked true communion not known since unborn he shared his mother’s body.

The river Lethe was mere forgetting. This is vast enjoining. Who knew oblivion was so intimate? Slide the needle in and push the plunger home. You’re gone, youre gone, you are g

one.

PIERCING SIRENS AND howling dogs and rhythmic patting wake him. Someone says Come on come on. He wonders what all the fuss is all about and realizes that the patting is the cabbie slapping him.

He sits up gasping hugely. Ambered overcast, Hollywood night. The cabbie kneeling over him, holding his arm.

The siren is his house alarm.

Where’d the Driver go?

Niko touches his chest. Gone?

But no. He feels his self still there. Now that he knows its shape within him it seems obvious. How could he not have known it’s been there all this time?

Sudden tears. The soul I sense inside me now. As if pregnant with my self. And shamed. I wanted to go with him. I loved him. o christ that is his power. That you go with him gladly. A poisoned aphrodisiac. This is what Jemma felt there at the end. This is what she felt. I am cuckolded by death itself and in his embrace would have done the same and happily. I am sick and so ashamed.

He shakes his head to clear his mind and looks up at the cabbie looking down. “What happened?” Nearly shouting in the din.

“He jumped out of the car and ran into you. He hugged you and then your house started yelling bloody murder, so he dropped you and ran through the gate in a big hurry. That part was pretty impressive.” Looking not at all impressed she drags on her cigarillo. “I thought you were a goner.”

“I think I was. How long ago?”

“Thirty seconds?”

“I have to turn the alarm off or this place’ll be crawling with rentacops.”

“I need to compress your back. You’re bleeding pretty bad.”

“Gotta help Nikodemus.”

But she’s already going around to the back of the cab and opening the trunk. “Can’t help anyone if you bleed to death.” She shuts the trunk. “Right?”

“Yes mother.”

The cabbie removes Niko’s shredded jacket and pulls up his flayed shirt. She draws a hissing breath and winces when she sees his back. Quickly and efficiently she puts on a thick compress and wraps his waist with surgical tape.

“I can’t believe you have a compress that size.” Niko tries to smile bravely and not think about how his back must look. “Maxi-pad. I can’t believe you’re not screaming your head off.”

She smooths the bloody end of the surgical tape across his belly. “Can’t feel a thing.”

She looks doubtful but helps Niko to his feet. He hisses like a brand in water. Now the cut hurts, now he feels his broken rib.

The cabbie brushes hair from her forehead and leaves behind a dark red streak of Niko’s blood. “Well I guess you’ll play the guitar again.”

Niko looks up from his field dressing. “Really? I don’t think so.” And as he says it knows it’s true.

“We better get in there,” says the cabbie.

“Yeah.”

The gate code is the date that he and Jemma floated on Lake Arrowhead and felt themselves begin again. Niko punches in this anniversary and the gate begins to rattle open. “This still isn’t your fight,” he tells the cabbie.

Her only reply is a get-serious expression and a gesture for him get moving, for which he gives a grateful smile. He owes her so very much.

Niko passes on into his statuaried driveway. Behind him the cabbie takes a last long pull at her cigarillo and flicks it away.

THE FRONT DOOR stands open. Niko and the cabbie look through the doorway at the veined marble floor, cherry knickknack shelves with dried flowers, Lalique crystal, an oval mirror. Niko is struck with sudden fear that he’ll see his own body on the couch, an empty hypodermic beside it. All of this the raving of a mind that’s shutting down. I am returned to haunt myself.

He gives the cabbie what he hopes is an encouraging look and limps into the ululating house. The black leather couch unoccupied. The empty hypodermic rests where it was tossed on the glasstopped table. Sweeping curve of carpeted staircase. No one else in sight.

Niko limps to the security alarm panel and enters the code. Sudden silence jars the house. Faint tick of the moonfaced clock. Niko jumps when the telephone rings.

“Security company?” the cabbie ventures.

Ah. He hobbles to the phone and picks it up and says Hello. “Regent Security, sir. We show an activation at your residence.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. My uh friend came into the house ahead of me and uh I was unloading the car. I forgot, sorry. It’s off now but thanks for—”

“Who am I speaking with please?”

“I’m the homeowner. Niko, Nikkoleides Popoudopolos.”

If the man from Regency recognizes Niko’s name it doesn’t register in his tone. “The alarm has been active for several minutes, sir. I’ve dispatched a unit to your home.”

Niko strangles the phone. Somehow he feels it’s all that’s holding him upright. “Oh that isn’t necessary. We’re fine.”

“Fine, sir. If I could just get your password.”

“Password.” Niko feels thick and stupid. “It’s eight oh one—”

“Not your alarm code, sir. Your secret password.”

Niko looks helplessly at the cabbie. This is just too fucking absurd. Here in his house in the Hollywood Hills there’s a dead body, a demon, a messenger of death, a mythic ferry operator, and a leaking mason jar containing his girlfriend’s soul, and he has no idea how to stop a bored security dispatcher on a telephone from sending armed rentacops to his door.

“I can’t recall the unit without your password, sir,” the dispatcher says into the silence.

“I’m sorry, I’ve just never had to use it, hold on a second.” Something thuds upstairs.

“Sir?”

Niko feels an absurd urge to command the dispatcher by one of the old Keys. Leave me alone, this has been willed where what is willed must be. But that won’t play here.

“Sir, I’m afraid I have to—”

“Lyre. It’s lyre, L Y R E.”

A pause. Niko hears taps on a keyboard. “That’s correct, sir. Sorry to trouble you.”

“No um trouble. You’re just doing your job.”

“You have a nice night now, sir,” says the dispatcher.

“Too late.” Niko drops the phone to the marble floor. “You all right?” the cabbie asks.

“Fuck no.” He nods at the stairs. “Let’s go.”

The cabbie helps him climb the stairs. Every step a gardenclaw embedded in his ribs and lower back and pulling. By the top of the sweeping curve his compress feels hot against his back and he suspects his wound is bleeding freely again. They pull up short at the top of the stairs and Niko grabs a newel to keep from falling down.

“Darn,” the cabbie says.

Down the hall stands Nikodemus, back to them and tattered wings outspread and trembling taut to fill the corridor. Niko starts to call out to him but suddenly the wings retract and Niko sees his demon holding the fractured mason jar and glaring sliteyed at the Driver who stands calm and confident between Nikodemus and the door to Jemma’s sickroom. Wearing his perpetual halfsmirk and waiting for the demon to make his move. With Jemma seeping out into the mortal night and Jemma’s body soon to pass all hope of resurrection time is on the Driver’s side.

The cabbie touches Niko’s arm. “Even if he gets by him he won’t have time to put her back.”

Niko tries to make what the cabbie says mean something but he’s having trouble making words connect. He feels he’s looking out through eyes not quite his own. But he understands that once again the game has changed and that their hastily concocted plan must be abandoned.

Just to drive home his point the Driver lights a cigarette and blows smoke in Nikodemus’ face. The demon whipcracks the air in frustration.

The sound goads Niko to action. “Give me a minute. Stall the Driver any way you can and then send Nikodemus my way when you hear me honk out front.”

She nods. Niko glances once more at the silent power struggle in the hallway and then struggles back down the staircase. He clumps through the living room and master dining room and into the big kitchen hung with copper pots. On the tiled wall a green-painted pegboard hung with several sets of keys. He snatches up the black keychain embossed with the winged B and hurries back as best he can through the living room. His lower back throbs in time with his heartbeat. Pain lances his ribs and flares his twisted ankle with every step. I am held together now with paperclips and duct tape. I believe my clock is winding down.

He clutches the keys and heads for the door. How strange to be back among his comforts and accumulations. He hadn’t expected to see them again when he left. An hour I’ve been gone. All this traveling encompassed by a single sweep of any clock. This time he feels no pang of loss at leaving them behind forever once again, and when he leaves he doesn’t look back.

THE BENTLEY CHIRPS and flashes and unlocks itself. The burgundy GT Speed looks almost black in this light. Niko nearly falls into the seat. It hurts but the pain is somewhere far away, a noise in another room. He touches his back and his palm comes away red. Well beyond panic at the sight of his own blood he merely shakes his head and wipes his palm on his filthy pants leg. The dealership’s gonna love me.

He starts the car and half expects it won’t turn over, thinking it must have been months since he drove it, but it starts right up and Niko realizes it has in fact, only been a few days since he took the Bentley out.

Niko drives out of the garage. Rounding the fountain in front of the house he sees the cabbie trotting down the driveway toward the front gate. What gives?