Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

“Take it to the cashier,” says Phil.

Niko stares at Phil and Phil continues to refuse to meet his gaze. Niko thinks he sees a glint of sunlight on Phil’s cheek below his sunglasses.

Phil turns away from Niko. “Come on, come on. You think you’re the only thing I have to deal with?”

Niko puts the card in a pocket.

Phil rubs beneath his sunglasses. “I’ll give you five minutes. Starting the second you leave the casino.” He produces his iPhone and begins tapping it. “After that I unload on you. The works. Both barrels. Got it?”

“Where do I find the cashier?”

“At the casino you moron. Don’t worry, you’ll have a ride.”

On the stage the brilliant souls worn to the quick have turned like sunflowers toward the two men in the stands. Robert Johnson motionless as furniture and looking naked with his guitar gone.

“You still here?” Phil tells the air before him. “Go on, get out of here. I’m sick of looking at you.”

Niko turns and walks away among the empty seats. On a sudden impulse pulls the locket from around his neck and flings it away. He clambers back onto the stage and passes among the silent damned until he stands before the young man with the cruelly mangled hands. He holds out the guitar but the man makes no move to accept it. Niko is about to put it on him when the man inclines his head at something and Niko turns to see his broken steel guitar beside the empty stool. Niko nods. A final gesture then. He goes to the front of the stage and holds the wooden guitar by the neck and raises it high and comes up on the balls of his feet and drops and brings the guitar down like a man at a midway trying to ring the bell with the big hammer. The guitar smashes all to hell with beautiful chaotic dissonance. Niko drops it beside the corpse of the Dobro and glances back to see the man’s reaction but there’s no longer anybody there. The stage is empty.

Again he looks out at the stands where Phil pretends to work his phone. He feels no sense of triumph or relief. Nothing is yet returned to him and he is not returned.

Niko turns to leave the stage but stops when Phil calls his old name. He waits to hear the coming admonition.

“You think you’ve won something here. But you always win this part.” Phil is looking at him now across the safety of some distance. “It’s what comes after this. That’s the part you always fuck up. It’s all just a dance we do here. The costumes change, the story doesn’t. The old rules still apply. The second you step out that door you’re Lot’s wife. One look back, one backward glance out of the corner of your eye, and that’s it. Game over. Got it?” Laughter sounds like grating metal. “Pretty simple, huh? Don’t look back.”

Don’t look back.

THE WIZENED DEMON behind the counter gapes at the scribbled card. “You gotta be kidding me.” His voice is keening and unpleasant. His “k’s” cause a repulsive shudder down Niko’s spine and conjure teeth sliding on aluminum. Behind the wideset bars the wrinkled demon squints beneath his darkgreen banker’s visor and shakes his head. He taps the shoulder of the demon beside him who is sorting teeth exchanged for playing chips. “Hey Clarence.”

“Thirty, thirtyone, thirty—shit.” Clarence looks over. “This better be good.”

The visored demon waves the card. “You ever see one of these?”

“What, a piece of paper?” He shakes his floppy eared head in disgust and rakes the bloodrooted teeth into a pile again. “One, two, three—”

“Not a piece of paper. A Property Requisition Slip.”

“A who?”

“Property Requisition Slip.”

“Who’s he when he’s at home?”

Niko presses his lips and grips the edge of the counter. “They’re for retrieving guest arrivals set aside for processing.”

“Since when do guests get anything retrieved?”

“That’s my point.” Visor flutters the card. “They don’t. Not that I ever heard anyway. But here’s a form.”

“Let me see that.” Clarence takes the card from Visor and examines it. He frowns and clucks and tuts and shakes his wattled head. He looks up to see Niko standing on their side of the counter and his frown deepens. “That side, meat pie.” He points a gnawed claw at the other side of the bars.

Niko grabs the demon’s turtlehide neck and bends close to one scabby flaccid ear and ignores the awful odor steaming from the hairy waxy pit of it. “You’ve got the form. It’s signed. Now get my item or the guy who signed it will be signing you with a rusty churchkey.”

Clarence wrests himself away. “All right, okay, criminy.” He hands the card back to Visor. “Here. He brought it to you.”

Visor blinks owlishly. He looks as if he’s going to protest but then looks at Niko and changes his fledgling mind. He furrows his mottled brow and huffs away.

Niko leans against the counter’s edge and hopes it doesn’t show that he feels he’s about to pass out. He has truly shot his wad. He watches in blackrimmed detachment as Clarence goes back to sorting moist teeth gobbets.

“Thirtyone, thirtytwo.” Clarence beams and scoops the bloody teeth into a drawstring bag and tosses the bag onto a heap of similar bags and then licks the edge of his palm clean. The green felt blotter on the counter before him dark with fluids. Clarence lowers his hand and looks at Niko. “What’s a churchkey?”

Niko ignores him and the demon shrugs and returns to his work. Niko shuts his eyes and draws a deep and ragged breath.

THE JOURNEY BACK to the casino had been strange but uneventful. The Black Taxi had ferried Niko out of the silent hills and onto the southbound Golden State freeway where it sped along the empty lanes toward a downtown abandoned as if a swift and purely fatal plague had swept across the world. The city so familiar and so alien.

At the East L.A. Interchange they got on the eastbound 10 and headed inland toward San Bernardino. Niko stared at the back of the Driver’s head and wondered what kind of ride he was being taken on. But Phil had spoken the agreement and it was binding and irrevocable.

At one point he had bolted upright. The guitar. Where was the guitar?

Then he remembered and settled back down on the spacious seat, heart hammering. He’d carried the Dobro so long that its absence was more conspicuous than its presence. Poor guitar. Niko felt as if he’d mistreated a faithful pet.

When he glanced out the window again not five minutes later the Black Taxi was exiting the 10 and curving round the fishhook ramp onto the northbound 15 toward Las Vegas. They could not have come this far this fast. That exit was forty or fifty miles from L.A. But to the left was the sprawling consumer mecca of the Ontario Mills Mall. They were headed toward Vegas all right.

A few minutes later daylight began to ebb. Niko looked left but saw no sign of sun. It had been bright afternoon at the Greek ten minutes ago. When he looked forward again the Black Taxi was coming down out of a long mountain pass and an island of multicolored light lay scattered on a dark and empty plain ahead. The air turned hot and dry and redolent with rotting meat and shit and an iron tinge of blood. Niko rolled the window up. He was back all right.

As the casino hove into view once more Niko thought of Van, whose dismissal of Las Vegas had been the last words he ever spoke. Is that where you come from, Niko asked the lighted structure as the big sedan pulled up against the curb. Did they pull you from my head? Was this whole mess tailormade for me? In his mind Phil shrugged and said What difference does it make?

The suicide door opened and Niko stared a moment before getting out. He patted himself down and glanced around the huge interior of the Franklin one more time. The Driver staring like a mannequin with the opened door between them. Niko searched for some smartassed or provocative comment but finally he just turned and walked toward the casino and pulled Phil’s scribbled card from his ragged coat pocket as the doors opened for him and he was swallowed again by light and sound and pain.