Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (29 page)

The downside to our new camp was that it took half an hour to walk to Center Camp for coffee. Steve and Saskia and Lawrence remained behind; Saskia had won almost a hundred dollars at cards and was eager to continue her streak, while Steve and Lawrence wanted to win it back, and besides, both of them claimed, a quick bottle of beer was all the morning pick-me-up they needed.
   The Café was buzzing with activity and we had to stand in line for fifteen minutes before a gorgeous redhead wearing stripey orange-and-black tights and a cowboy hat covered with plastic cockroaches sold us our morning mochas. We turned, headed across the café to find a place to sit, walked maybe twenty steps, and very nearly collided with Zoltan and Zorana as they cut across one of the coffee lineups.
   I went cold before I even consciously recognized them. My stomach tightened painfully and my hands started to shake, spilling hot mocha on my fingers. Pavlovian fight-or-flight response. Talena gasped. They were no less surprised to see us. All four of us froze dead still for several seconds, staring at one another in shock. The burners in the nearby coffee lineup turned and curiously observed our tableau.
   I told myself that we weren’t in immediate danger. They wouldn’t dare try anything here in the Café. The important thing was to ensure that they didn’t find out where we were camped, and to stay cool. I tried to tell my nervous system that neither fight nor flight was the right response. It didn’t seem at all convinced.
   Zorana recovered first. “Balthazar,” she said, smiling as if with delight, her voice so smooth she was practically purring. “Talena. What a pleasure it is to see you.”
   Talena smiled thinly back. “The pleasure is all yours.”
   “You know what I see?” Zoltan growled. “I see two dead people.”
   “Wow, just like the Sixth Sense,” I said, managing to keep my voice amused and dismissive. As I expected he didn’t get the reference and for a second his menace turned to bewilderment. Fine by me. If you can’t beat ‘em, outweird ‘em.
   “We gave you a chance,” Zorana said to me. “We should have known you would spurn it. You stupid, stupid man.”
   “I will finish with you,” Zoltan said to Talena. “I will finish you. I will make you –”
   I said, “Shut the fuck up, you bloated sack of shit.”
   They were so surprised at being addressed in that way – I was probably the first person to do so in a long, long time – that they actually did shut up. Zoltan and Zorana, very accustomed to fear, were much less familiar with anger. And when Zoltan had threatened Talena it was like he had flicked a switch in my mind from FEAR to RAGE. I wanted to gouge his eyes out, tear his head off, plunge my fist into his chest and pull out his still-beating heart.
   “I was going to give you a chance,” I said. “I was going to say, go out and give yourself up to the FBI and we’ll all call it a day. But fuck that. Fuck prison. Prison’s too good for you.”
   “Your mouth,” Zoltan said contemptuously. “It flaps like the wings of a bird.”
   Now he had weirded me out. I had never heard Zoltan wax poetic before.
   “One day soon,” he continued, “I will make it stop flapping and start to scream. Your mouth, Paul Wood, it will scream for very long. Your mouth, but first, hers. She will scream for very long, and I will make you watch.”
   “Promises, promises,” Talena said airily.
   I forced a casual smile and inwardly raged at the Brady bill. If I had had a gun I would have shot him right then and there, in the middle of Center Camp Café, to hell with the spectators. I was tempted to fling my hot mocha in his eyes. But with his boxer’s reflexes he might well dodge, and even if I succeeded there were surely Black Rock Rangers present, Burning Man’s unofficial and unarmed law enforcement, who would expel me from Black Rock City. It wasn’t quite worth it.
   “Not promises,” Zorana said. “Prophecy.”
   “Are you about finished,” I asked, “or would you like to vomit out more horseshit and call it conversation?”
   “So proud,” Zoltan said. “Such a man. Such a big man. Do you know, Paul Wood, do you know how many big men like you I have watched to die?”
   I wanted to say something to rattle him. Something like “so how’s tonight’s drug deal going?” or “booked your flight to Tijuana yet?” I almost did. It would have almost been worth it to reveal that we knew exactly why he was here, just to shake his implacably menacing composure for a moment.
   “What did you do, bore them to death?” I asked instead. Not much of a comeback.
   Zorana said something to Zoltan in a low voice, in Serbian. Later Talena told me it was ‘We should go.’
   “Goodbye, Paul,” Zoltan said, staring straight into my eyes. “You should pray to every God, every night, that I never again see you.”
   “Oh, no no no. We will meet again,” I said. “Once. Very, very briefly.”
   “On the contrary,” Zorana said to us both, “when we meet again, it will feel like a long time. A terribly long time. For you it will feel like forever. And when it is over, I will know both of you so well. Better than you know each other. You can learn so much about a person. You have no idea how much.”
   I began to wonder if Zorana was the really crazy one.
   “Until we meet again,” she said.

 They turned and walked away, inwards, towards the Man. We watched them until they were well past the Esplanade, into the playa. I was pleased to see them furtively glance over their shoulders several times. For all their threats and intimidation they were at least a little worried about us following them.
   “Are you frightened?” Talena asked me quietly, as we walked back towards our camp.
   “Yes. Are you?”
   “Yes.”
   We walked a little further.
   “But I’m angry too,” I said. “I’m more angry than scared. I’m furious.”
   “Good,” Talena said. “Me too. Me too very fucking much.”
* * *
   The Temple of Gravity, half art and half dance club, was in the empty playa beyond the Man, a good twenty-minute walk from the nearest camps. Four huge slabs of concrete hung on chains at a 60-degree angle from two high intersecting arches of solid steel. In the center, a huge brass brazier burned. When we arrived at 4:15 in the morning, more than a hundred people still perched on the concrete slabs or swayed to the throbbing music. I assumed most of them were coming down from E or acid or some other unnatural-stamina drug.
   At this hour the desert was very cold, the day’s blistering heat a distant memory. We all wore jackets or sweaters, but I don’t think we really needed them. The adrenaline alone would have kept us warm.
   Despite Steve’s desire for action our plan featured yet more waiting and watching. Watch the deal take place, and then follow Zoltan and Zorana back to their camp. When we found out where they lived, we would be able to make some informed decisions about what to do next. I wasn’t looking forward to that part. I knew that the road we had begun to walk had only one logical conclusion. Sneak into their camp at night and murder them as they slept. I could barely even think of it. I didn’t know if I could do that. Not for practical reasons, not because they might ambush us, or because the authorities might catch us and jail us forever. I just didn’t think I could bring myself to kill someone like that, coldblooded, premeditated, not even a monster like Zoltan, not even after what he had done to us. In hot blood, if he threatened Talena in front of me, sure. But crouched over his sleeping form? I didn’t know if I could do that. I didn’t know if I wanted to be able do that.
   “They’re on the move,” Lawrence said, his voice low.
   There were two people from Smack Dealer Camp in the tricycle and three more in the spider-car, a Volkswagen Beetle tricked out with eight welded steel limbs, a spider’s head, and mandibles, all made of gleaming albeit playa-dusted chrome. There were guns aboard the tricycle, and the spider-car contained a crate carrying thirteen million U.S. dollars. Judging from their grunts as they had hoisted it into the trunk, that much money weighed a whole hell of a lot.
   They moved slowly enough that we were easily able to follow at walking speed, probably because they didn’t want to attract any adverse attention. We stayed far enough away that we could only just see the headlight perched above the tricycle. We followed that light into utter darkness for several minutes. A light breeze blew. The moon was new, and above us the sky was full of so many stars there barely seemed to be room for them all. The pale band of the Milky Way was clearly visible. Talena held our shotgun mike, Lawrence the binoculars. Behind us, we could see the glow of the Temple of Gravity, the Man, and the Esplanade, but before us the darkness was broken only by the tricycle’s headlight and, far away, a faint dim red light moving slowly left to right. Hatter had told me about the perimeter scouts, Black Rock Coyotes, armed with heat and motion sensors, patrolling the fence lest people enter without paying. It was ironic that up here “coyote” meant someone who prevented a border crossing.

Talena and I held hands tightly as we walked. We each wore one of the shotgun mike’s two headphones, which were the kind that clipped individually on to one’s ear. It was so dark that I only knew the others were still with me from the soft crunching sounds of their boots on the playa. The wind grew stronger, a blessing and a curse. It obscured the air with swirling playa dust and drowned out small sounds, which made it easier for us to go undiscovered, but harder to see and hear with the binoculars and shotgun mike.

Now that something was finally happening I was alert, adrenalized, more excited than scared. The situation felt unreal and dreamlike. Every physical sense seemed to have been artificially heightened. I imagined I could feel individual motes of playa dust as they brushed against my skin, could pick out individual lines on Talena’s palm.

We closed to maybe three hundred feet from the tricycle. It was hard to judge distance. The headlight went out. A moment later, two flashlights winked on next to it. I listened intently, but the shotgun mike amplified the whistling wind into the howl of an oncoming gale; I could hear that words were being spoken, but not what they were.

 “We have to get closer,” Talena said.
   “Won’t you come a little closer, said the spider to the fly,” I murmured to myself.
   We began to approach.
   “No,” Saskia said. “We should go to the left.”
   I stopped, surprised to hear Saskia volunteer a suggestion. “Why?”
   “So the wind blows from them to us. We will hear them much better that way. If we go too much closer, and they have other people watching, they will see us.”
   “What other people?” Talena asked, low-voiced.
   “Snipers. Sometimes we had meetings like this to exchange prisoners, in the war. Always both sides had many snipers watching.”

I had forgotten that Saskia had actually fought on the front lines, in Sarajevo. “All right,” I said. We circled to the left.
   “We’ll need to run some tests,” a nervous voice said over the wind noises in my right ear, and I twitched with surprise at the voice’s unexpected volume and clarity, as if the speaker stood as close to me as Talena. Saskia had been right. We were no nearer, but standing downwind of them, the sound was much clearer.
   “Tests, yes, okay,” a voice said. Zoltan’s voice. He sounded bored.
   Lawrence passed me the binoculars. Four figures I recognized from Smack Dealer Camp stood in the light of two flashlights, presumably held by Zoltan and Zorana. Between them, on the playa, lay an open duffel bag full of bags of white powder. Just like the movies. One of the Smack Dealer Camp boys knelt knext to the backpack, opened a small briefcase next to it, and began to perform a set of delicate maneuvers, presumably making sure that what they were buying was in fact reasonably pure heroin. I handed the binoculars to Saskia, wondering how it could be that we lived in a world where this single duffel bag, full of the slightly processed petals of a flower so common it was practically a weed, was worth so much.
   Zorana said something in Serbian. Talena stiffened next to me.
   “What?” I whispered.
   “She said, ‘they have a clear view,’” Talena whispered back.
   I didn’t like the sound of that. It had to mean that Saskia was right, there were other people out here, allies of Zoltan and Zorana, watching the deal as it happened. Their insurance. Which was very bad news. First of all it meant that we had more than just Zoltan and Zorana to deal with. Second it meant that their friends, presumably armed, could be anywhere around us, and could spot us at any minute.
   “It’s good,” the crouching man reported.
   “The money?” Zorana asked.
   “It’s in there,” one of the Smack Dealer Camp representatives, a woman, said. “We can stay while you count it.”
   “No need,” Zorana said.
   “That’s very trusting of you,” the other woman said, surprised.
   “It is not you we trust,” Zoltan said. “It is your fear.”
   A brief silence followed.
   “Well. Pleasure doing business with you,” the Smack Dealer Camp man lied. “We look forward to a long and mutually prosperous relationship. The key’s in the ignition. Enjoy.”
   The crouching man zipped up and picked up the duffel bag. It was obviously heavy. The four from Smack Dealer Camp made their way back to the tricycle, leaving the spider-car unoccupied. I nodded slowly, understanding. There was so much money, it was so heavy, that the deal had to include a transport vehicle.
Zoltan and Zorana approached the spider-car and were about to enter its open doors. Then Zorana stopped, abruptly, in mid-motion, and said something in harsh urgent Serbian.
   “Shit,” Talena said. “They’ve seen us.”
   We all took a quick moment to absorb that.
   “We better go,” Lawrence said.
   I shook my head. “We have to find out where their camp is.”
   “All we have to do is find that spider car tomorrow. Come on.”
   “No,” I said. “They’ll think of that. They’ll hide it somehow. We have to find –”
   I saw something flicker below my field of vision. I looked down to my chest and the dim red dot which had materialized there. I still hadn’t quite worked out its implications when Saskia tackled me. Despite her size she hit me hard enough that I let go of Talena’s hand and fell to the ground. The headphone tore free of my ear.
   I stumbled to my feet. “What was that?”
   “Laser sight,” Saskia said.

Lawrence said, “It is
definitely
time for us to go.”
   The headlights of the spider-car lit up and it began to move in our general direction. In its windows, two flashlights winked on and began to scan back and forth across the playa.
   The situation was bad and could quickly become disastrous. Zoltan and Zorana had completed their transaction and had the money and a vehicle. They were certainly armed, and they had allies somewhere out here in the darkness who had guns with laser sights. Once they knew it was us, they wouldn’t hesitate to shoot. And they had inadvertently lured us out into an ideal kill site; late at night, an unoccupied patch of playa, nobody around. Lawrence was right, we had to run, now, and there was no way to follow them back to their camp. Even if we could circle around somehow, they were in a car, they moved too fast. We would lose them.