28 The Grim Reapress

The next morning Evan was roused from sleep with a shotgun pressed into the side of his neck. He opened his eyes, looking up the length of the barrel past the neon orange stock at Manny. Manny grimaced, those teeth flashing — Jaws from James Bond gone rapper. “Get your culo up.”

Evan eased to a sitting position. The metal bore remained shoved into the side of his throat. Nando stood five feet back and to the side, a second shotgun at the ready.

“You’re wanted downstairs,” Manny told him. “But I’m thinking maybe you have a accidente right here. You made a move on me. I reacted.”

Evan’s eyes slid to Manny’s finger on the trigger. His knuckle was white, the trigger partially depressed. Another half pound of pressure and the opposite wall would be wearing Evan’s trachea.

“Samuel. Yoenis. Álcides. Memo. Luis. Eddie. I will not forget those names.” Manny’s voice shook. “We took them out to the woods last night. And said good-bye.”

Tears leaked from his eyes, but he kept the shotgun level, making no move to wipe his face. He glided the barrel up Evan’s chin, ground it across his cheek, shoved his nose to the side.

Evan didn’t meet his eyes. He looked at the far wall. Kept his body language neutral. Hoped he hadn’t pushed Manny far enough that he’d contradict René’s orders and kill the golden goose. Though Evan had stared down more gun barrels than he’d care to recount, decapitation by beanbag presented new intricacies he didn’t want to contemplate.

Santa Muerte’s skull head grinned from the side of Manny’s neck. The Grim Reapress. She wore a blue cloak bedecked with roses, one skeletal hand clutching a scythe, the other an hourglass. At the moment of death, she was said to sever the silver thread of life.

Evan wondered if now was the moment that the scythe would fall, that his own thread would be cut. He stared ahead. Waited for a one-centimeter movement of Manny’s knuckle.

“Manny,” Nando said. “Manny.” He stepped forward and tugged at Manny’s shoulder. An instant later the pressure relented.

“We won’t forget what you made us do,” Manny said. “Now get your shit downstairs.”

* * *

Evan was marched along the ground floor through a moist corridor scented of lavender and rose water. At Nando and Manny’s prompting, he pushed through a glass door beaded with condensation and stepped into a sprawling spa area.

They passed a Jacuzzi, a cold-water plunge pool, a teabag stuffed with herbs slung into a freestanding marble tub. Various enclosures were labeled with sleek metal placards: SAUNA, EUCALYPTUS STEAM ROOM, RAIN SHOWER. The Korean mist room featured a concrete bench studded with large smooth pebbles, matching the Zen-Disneyland motif of the rest of the spa.

They came to a small lap pool fringed with artificial grass that crunched pleasingly beneath Evan’s bare feet. He was wearing only the boxer shorts he’d slept in.

René waited cocked back in a zero-gravity chair, paperback hoisted overhead, the inverted V like a bird in flight. An IV tube snaked from one arm to a saline bag dangling off a chrome stand.

Smoking an electronic cigarette, David propped himself against a paisley-shaped bar made of rich polished wood and decorated with a string of fat Christmas lights. A bottle of Bacardi 151 sat beside his rocks glass, which was filled to the brim with square ice cubes and the amber rum. A tray of bar treats waited at his elbow. He munched Doritos from a crinkly bag, puffed vapor, sipped his drink.

René rotated forward in his chair, sinking his feet into a bubbling tank suffused with blue UV lighting. As Evan neared, he noticed dozens of tiny fish inside, swirling about René’s feet and ankles.

René flicked his paperback toward the bar. “Made from sustainably farmed rain-forest wood from Brazil,” he said. “Can you imagine caring that much?”

“Why do you have it, then?”

“None of this is mine.” His gesture encompassed the chalet. “I rent this life. What is mine is hidden away down a rabbit hole.” A smile. “Just like you do it.”

Leaning over a side table, he exchanged his book for one of the slender white remotes that seemed to operate the entire chalet and its personnel. He keyed a few buttons and let it rattle back onto the table.

A moment later two huge metal panels in the far wall parted to reveal a narrow elevator with Dr. Franklin inside. He trudged over to René, cautiously removed the IV from the crook of his elbow, and scurried back to the elevator. The doors closed, and Evan watched the lit numbers above as the doctor descended to a basement level.

Straightening his pricked arm, René buttoned his shirtsleeve. Even here in the humidity of the spa, his sartorial elegance was on display. “Would you like a refreshment?”

“Bag of Doritos would be good.”

“Nando, please fetch our guest some chips.”

Before Nando could move, David reached for a bag.

“Don’t, David,” René said. “Let Nando handle it.”

David smiled around his plastic e-smoke filter, the blinking Christmas lights casting his face in different colors. He pushed himself off the bar, walked across to Evan, and held out the bag. Manny and Nando moved closer, aiming at Evan’s head.

David shook the bag in front of Evan. “Go on,” he said.

Evan took the Doritos.

David scanned Evan’s body. “You don’t strike me as the junk-food type.”

“You don’t strike me as the e-cigarette type.”

“Oh. This. I’m trying to work my way up to real cigarettes, but I hate the taste. I just graduated from nicotine patches.”

“Congratulations.”

David gave a mock curtsy.

“Step away from him,” René said.

“He’s not gonna hurt me,” David said.

René tilted his head at Manny, who gently but firmly pulled David back toward the bar while Nando and his raised shotgun eased into Evan’s blind spot.

David returned to his overproof rum. “You’re such a dick,” he said into his rocks glass. “You think you can control everything.” He gulped down the rest, slammed the heavy tumbler on the sustainably farmed rain-forest wood, and ambled out.

René smiled indulgently.

He followed Evan’s gaze, looking down at his feet. In the tank the fish had clustered around his toes and heels. “You starve them, you see. Doctor fish. At a certain point of hunger, they develop a taste for human flesh. I suppose anything will. They eat away the dead skin, slough off the calluses and psoriasis patches.” The grin widened. “Nibble away my imperfections.” He waved a hand. “You’re welcome to have a treatment yourself.”

Evan pictured himself with cucumber slices on his eyes, slathered with mud, Manny and Nando zeroed in on him over shotgun sights.

“No thanks.”

“Maybe have Dr. Franklin do some laser treatment on that nasty scar on your stomach.”

Evan stared down at the white line on his abdomen where a woman had once slid his own knife beneath his ribs. He’d stitched it up himself on the floor of his bathroom, a bloody, painful affair during which he’d discovered fresh nuances in an already intimate relationship with pain.

“I like my scars,” he said. “They remind me of who I am.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“You don’t need to,” Evan said. “Why am I here? I assume not just to discuss your grooming habits?”

“Do you have somewhere you need to be?”

Evan thought of the Horizon Express, steaming onward. And the boy’s voice coming through the wrecked RoamZone: Will you help me? Will you? Promise me.

“Yes,” he said.

René said, “Two more days and you can be on your way.”

“Assuming I send the wire.”

“You haven’t resigned yourself to the outcome?”

“Why give up when I’m winning the war?”

Behind him Evan heard Manny curse at him in Spanish.

“About that.” René lifted one dripping foot from the tank and then the other. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

Pulling on a heavy robe, he knotted the sash. Then he leaned over and sprayed down the zero gravity chair with mist from the clear cylindrical bottle.

“What is that?” Evan asked.

“Privacy spray. It removes ninety-nine-point-five percent of DNA from surfaces. And obscures the remaining point-five percent by layering it over with a blend of genetic material.” René stomped his feet into a waiting pair of moon boots. “You’re not the only one who can make himself disappear. When I decide I don’t want to be found, no one ever finds me.”

For now Evan let that go.

Manny and Nando got Evan moving back through the gauntlet of steam rooms and up various hallways, René keeping well ahead of them. At last the giant chandelier of the foyer bloomed overhead.

Tightening his thick bathrobe, René stepped out onto the porch, then turned and faced them across the expanse of the foyer. Wind fluttered his hair. Snow had fallen last night. Standing there in the doorway, he was silhouetted against the vivid white backdrop.

He curled a finger. Come.

Manny and Nando prompted Evan, and he walked across the frigid marble floor. Already he could feel the bite of the outside air. The minute he stepped out, the air assailed him. His boxers provided scant cover. Manny and Nando put him on the opposite side of the porch, safely away from René, who stood waiting in his cozy robe and moon boots.

Evan tucked the bag of chips into the waistband of his boxers so he could blow into his hands. His cheeks and lips felt raw. He wasn’t sure how long he would be made to stand out here.

Before he saw anything, he heard the faint drone of an engine reverberating around the walls of the valley. Then a plume of exhaust came visible, thin as a straw, way up the gravel road at the horizon. Soon he made out the dot of a black vehicle. It resolved as one of the Mercedes Geländewagens.

The autumn chill burrowed beneath his flesh, firing the nerves inside his scrapes and bruises. Muscle throbbed over aching bones. He thought he might freeze solid before the vehicle — and whatever it was carrying — arrived.

He bounced on his bare feet, doing his best to keep warm. He could no longer feel his face. On the far side of the porch, René whistled a chipper tune.

It took an eternity, but at last the G-Wagon pulled in to the circular driveway, the tires clicking over the cobblestones. It stopped. The tinted windows threw back Evan’s reflection. His skin was tinged blue.

The driver’s door opened first, and Dex unloaded himself from behind the steering wheel. Then the other three doors and tailgate opened in concert.

New narco guards emerged from the G-Wagon, one after another, a clown-car stunt carried off with military precision. Ten of them. They formed a neat line in front of the vehicle, awaiting orders from René.

“Good,” Evan said. “You brought me more people to kill.”

But René just turned to him, his moon boots scraping on the porch, and smiled.

“No limits,” he said.

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