Mortality Bridge (7 page)

CLEAR YOUR THOUGHTS and make your preparations. The words you’ll need. Ordered arcane syllables to unlock, undo, unmask. Guttural doggerel in lost languages like choking nursery rhymes. Their phrases surface now like chants from preschool primers.

He has her oh the son of a bitch he took her. You goateyed bastard I will eat your heart and spit out the pits.

Niko quickly changes into hiking shoes and bluejeans and a black T-shirt. A light jacket for the cool Los Angeles night. Should he bring a daypack? Food? How long will he be gone? A day, a week, a month?

Niko shakes his head. How could he know? How could anyone?

His fingers find the locket warm against his chest. Okay, travel light. No backpack, no supplies. It takes a month or more to starve to death, and if you’re gone that long, well, starvation probably won’t be at the top of your worries. The Dobro’s gonna be a bitch in any case.

Weapons? Niko gives a disgusted laugh. Killing anything where he is bound would be redundant. Better to be hungry and wily, unarmed and afraid.

Something, he’s forgetting something. And remembers.

IN THE PANTRY Niko finds the old box of jumbo milkbones and opens it and takes one out. Algae-green and big as a crescent wrench. He slips it into the inner breast pocket of his light coat. Weapons come in many forms.

HEADLIGHTS SWEEP ACROSS the living room draperies and Niko glances out the window to see a car pull up to the distant gate. The intercom buzzes and Niko taps the button that opens the gate. He turns away from the window and surveys the room as a chuffing engine approaches outside.

Living room, staircase, bedroom door. Furnishings, mementos, objets d’art. Our life together. Who do you think you are? Where do you think you’re going?

That baleful bedroom door shut soundly, rising like a tombstone down the upstairs hall. How can you just leave her here?

But no. Jemma’s not in there. A feather in a mason jar.

A plaintive halfassed horn toots twice. Outside the door an engine hiccoughs and sneezes.

Niko picks up the guitar case and feels a little foolish as he taps the code on the house alarm. As if concerned with guarding objects. But what if it gets tripped and rentacops show up with Jemma there upstairs? No, no. Her body has to stay there undisturbed, has to be there when he gets back. So he punches in the code and turns his back on several lifetime’s acquisitions, and when he leaves he does not look back.

DENTED AND DIRTY, some long ago fenderbender having set the dinged chrome bumper aslant in a smirk, a classic Checker Cab idles roughly in the driveway before the silent fountain. It looks like a ’55 Chevy on steroids. All that can be seen of the cabbie is an arm resting alongside the lowered driver’s window, faint orange of a lit cigarillo between two fingers.

When she hears the front door shut the cabbie hurries out and opens the cab’s rear door for Niko. The interior light tints the dirty rear windshield to the yellow of an old newspaper.

The cabbie is short, acne scarred, ponytailed, tomboyish. A ghost of former glamor haunts her features. Her eyes are bright and alive in a face that has peered into a great many dark corners. Her expression seems ready to smile in a worldly wise and weary way, as if about to be told a joke she’s already heard but still finds funny. Khaki shirt and loosely knotted thin black jazzman’s tie, old leather sneakers probably white in some former incarnation. She nods goodevening as Niko approaches and she drops her remaining inch of cigarillo and grinds a battered sneaker on the smoking butt, then holds out nicotine stained fingers for Niko’s hardcase with exactly the proper tentativeness. “Set that in the trunk, sir?”

Niko shakes his head and tries to place the cabbie’s accent.

“All right.” The cabbie sets her hand upon the opened door. The latent smile blooms. “Step into my office.” A crescent moon of grime beneath each nail.

The hardcase leads the way as he climbs in. Springs creak beneath the old bench seat and hinges squeal past audibility as the cabbie slams the door. Dog notes, Jemma called it when session producers made her sing at the top of her range.

As the cabbie gets behind the wheel Niko takes in leather upholstery, creaking springs, engine knocking stallward, huge bench seat patched with duct tape peeling up on one edge to reveal the original color which Niko thinks of as banker’s green. Lots of legroom. Smells of tobacco, leather, stale coffee from stained styrofoam cups on the floorboard, rims pressed flat with endless tiny crescent thumbnail marks. Litter of empty Swisher Sweets cigarillo packs and half-used matchbooks, gumwrappers, foodstained restaurant stubs, a pullout ashtray against the driver’s seatback overflowing with gumwads and cigarette butts, broken pencil nubs, tarnished pennies, a torn Butterfinger wrapper.

The cabbie glances at Niko in the rearview but Niko doesn’t notice. She grinds the cab in gear and eases round the waterless fountain and down the long enstatued driveway and then stops before the gate. Clanking metal as it opens automatically and the Checker Cab moves across the threshold and out into the careless world. Behind them the housegate rattles shut.

The cabbie’s bright eyes in the rearview slat. “Where to, sir?”

Niko sets a hand against the locket underneath his shirt, the other on the hardcase firm against his leg. “Follow that cab,” he says.

V.

CROSSTOWN TRAFFIC

THE BIG YELLOW cab snakes down from the Hollywood Hills and onto Sunset Boulevard and has a deceptively unhampered run down the Strip. Traffic’s heavy but moving as they ride east toward Hollywood and into Friday night cruising and tourism. Turning north from La Cienega to Highland runs them into automotive quicksand and they inch through the intersection.

The cabbie seems aware of Niko’s urgency. Near Franklin she works the cab into the beercan lane and ignores the angry honks as their car glides by crawling traffic. Every redlight turns to green at their approach as they head toward the Hollywood Freeway.

Soon the Hollywood Bowl marquee slides past in the center divider. Niko remembers the old terraced clamshell looming behind him with its enormous floating globe clusters like grapes in a giant’s cornucopia, the frozen wave of audience before him, his trademark stillness in the midst of all the beehive hum, the surf roar of the crowd above his sustained demoniac feedback howl. Homeowners two miles away had complained about the volume. Nowadays he’d likely be one of them.

The Checker Cab turns a slow hairpin right and enters the access road leading to the ramp for the Hollywood Freeway southbound. The freeway’s packed and barely moving. No one lets the cab merge as the entry lane tapers away but the cabbie eases into a space between a BMW and a Honda that Niko would have sworn could not have fit a motorcycle.

Niko tries to relax as they inch toward downtown but mostly he feels numb. Where grief ought to be is only silence, vacated space. “Are you giving a show sir?”

Niko glances up. “Sorry?”

“Got a gig?”

Niko looks at the guitar case and laughs without a trace of humor. “You could say that.”

The cabbie nods.

Niko makes his hand let go the case but a minute later it is tracing its contours again. Somewhere up ahead that mason jar contains its featherweight of soul. Do I feel her out there really? I think I do. Then don’t let go of that.

He fidgets on the patched green seat and watches sluggish freeway traffic and old familiar landmarks. Capitol Records tower on the right at Vine. In the hills ahead the Griffith Observatory, the Greek Theatre. His laminated past.

Brakelights flash ahead and the Checker Cab groans to a stop near Western. “Sorry,” says the cabbie.

Niko glares at stalled traffic.

The hot night is unusually humid. The freeway smells of oil, rubber, gasoline. Niko’s fingers drum the guitar case. The cabbie glances at her rearview and seems to be considering. Without signaling she muscles the cab across three creeping lanes into the narrow breakdown lane and ignores the angry honks that follow in their wake. She snaps on the radio and Charlie Parker blows like Gabriel on smack. Engine valves rattle like bones in a box.

Near the Virgil offramp the breakdown lane is blocked by firetrucks and a paramedic van. A silver Arco tanker has overturned and sloughed across the right two lanes until the bulldog radiator ornament chewed the concrete retainer wall. The eighteen wheeler’s cab is crumpled like a roadside beercan. The wet roadway gleams orange streetlight and a leaden smell of gasoline saturates the night. Firemen unreel hoses as jackbooted CHiPs pace before the halted traffic. Drivers talk on cellphones. Overhead a harpy helicopter rides a spotlight cone. Off the freeway a giant cartoon figure in a tophat looms atop the Western Exterminator Company building, hiding a mallet behind his back and admonishing a giant rat who holds a knife and fork.

Firemen cut away the big-rig’s driver side door with the jaws of life. From out the smashed inverted truck cab comes a thin and sharpdressed man who holds a jar containing something palely glowing. Eyes in shadow and pale orange streetlight malarial on his face’s lower half. A large and twisted doll hangs glistening in the cab behind him. Arms upraised as if in belated surrender. Niko wants to look away but cannot look away. The inert form so recently breathing, thinking, driving toward its life’s conclusion without the slightest clue. Niko thinks of Van bent forward against the steering wheel of the station wagon and looking at Niko but seeing nothing anymore. Van who not ten seconds before the absurdly mild accident had been shutting Niko down about Las Vegas. The house of cards that is a human life.

On the radio now the sibilance of bottleneck slide.

The Black Taxi Driver wipes the mason jar clean with a white silk kerchief as heedless paramedics hurry past him into the truck cab. The CHiPs ignore him passing in their busy midst. A fireman cradling a length of hose now braces himself as it swells like a regurgitating python. He directs the spray across the freeway surface to dilute the gasoline as the Black Taxi driver strolls past him and toward the black 1933 Franklin sedan idling smoothly in the breakdown lane on the clear stretch of freeway on the other side of the wreck.

The cabbie drums her grime-crescented nails on the steering wheel in time with the radio’s heartbreak blues and glances in the rearview at her passenger. “These old songs are still the best, I think.”

Niko stares blankly at the cabbie and then realizes it is himself playing on the radio. Niko twenty years ago and hurt and pissed off and freighting every note with feeling.

The cabbie stubs out her cigarillo and feathers the accelerator. Valves protest like rowdy clams. “This isn’t generally allowed,” she says. She pushes a sequence of radio buttons and then eases the cab forward and cuts right and heads between stalled lanes. Cars are not a yard apart here yet somehow the Checker Cab passes between them. Niko fights an urge to yell. On one side the orangelit concrete retainer wall flows past a foot away from the cab. On the other the firetrucks are not a foot beyond the door. Ahead the trucks and wall are only a few feet apart.

Niko’s vision blurs. His brain can’t make it fit. “I see your radio gets some extra stations,” he says.

The cabbie smiles tightly. “One or two.”

Seconds later they are past the firetrucks, the wreck, the stalled traffic. Just past the wreck the Black Taxi sits purring on the other side of the road. Niko’s heartbeat ratchets up a gear. The son of a bitch is right there, a hundred feet away. The marine layer is encroaching and a misting stillness lies hardedged about the miles between the two cars and the clustered downtown skyscrapers rising futuristic in the distance, lighting up the very air about them like some alien encampment.

Niko sees a match flare and then a cigarette glow behind the driver’s window of the Black Taxi. The window rolls down smoothly and a long thin arm emerges, gold cufflink gleaming in a crisp white cuff, glowing cigarette clamped between thumb and forefinger. The cufflink winks, the finger flicks, the cigarette arcs away, and the Black Taxi smokes rubber and leaps forward like a dragster while behind it the discarded cigarette is a tiny meteor streaking an impossible distance back toward the wrecked and bleeding tanker.

Niko bolts forward and grips the cabbie’s seatback and yells Go.

The Checker Cab lumbers forward and gains speed, engine valves complaining castanets. Niko looks back toward the wreck just as an aurora of paleblue flame springs from the pavement where the cigarette butt landed and races toward the leaking tanker like some kind of magic trick. Niko winces in expectation of some worldconsuming blast, but a fireman taps a hose-wielding colleague on the shoulder and points, and the man merely nods and turns with the hose and drowns the spreading curtain of pale flame.

Niko lets out his breath and turns forward again to see the taillights of the speeding Franklin half a mile ahead. Two cars drawn like moths toward luminous downtown.

THE LONG BLACK Franklin whips out from in front of a Fed Ex truck just before the Golden State Freeway divider and at the last possible moment angles across a broad expanse of lanes and nearly sideswipes a concrete divider at the Temple exit before it takes the exit ramp at twice the posted speed.

“Gee,” says the cabbie. “Think he’s onto us?” She cuts the wheel and the Checker Cab slews across three lanes to the Temple offramp. Ahead of them the Franklin runs the light and slews left onto Temple beside Our Lady of the Angels cathedral.

Niko snatches at the strap as the Checker Cab squeals around the ramp. The traffic signal just ahead turns green for them as they turn left on Temple. Tires screech to either side as drivers panic-stop for a light that went from green to red without a yellow inbetween.

Ahead of them the Franklin turns a sudden right. The Checker Cab howls around the corner in a fourwheel drift and now they’re heading down Hill fast, driving through the Civic Center past generic slabs of government buildings. A few hundred yards ahead the Black Taxi slows to a crawl and then speeds away. The cabbie guns the engine.