Free Nightlife by Brian Hodge Page B

hidden behind an untucked shirt. A couple of days of beard darkened his face.
    “If you don’t beat all,” Barrows said, and dropped down a few seats away. He looked at Kerebawa and shook his head. “You know, I could get in all kinds of trouble hauling you into the country like this. Won’t be using that passport Angus got you. No visa. No customs clearance.”
    Kerebawa frowned with confusion. This was mostly gibberish.
    “Papers,” Barrows said, and that got the point across. “An illegal alien, that’s what you’ll be.”
    “I will disappear before anyone can ask me for them.”
    “Yeah, I believe that much. Lucky for you, we’re flying into a smaller airport outside the city. Miami International, you’d probably never make it out of that place alive.”
    Kerebawa said nothing.
    “Why are you doing this?” Barrows asked, eyes narrowing. “What does this have to do with Angus dying?”
    “I must find something for him. I promised.”
    Barrows grinned wryly, shook his head. “Promise to a dead man. Don’t that beat all. He was really a good friend to you, wasn’t he?”
    Kerebawa smiled, gazed up into the plane’s roof. “He came when I was a child. The elders say he was funny then. They say he was . . . very foolish. They could talk him into giving away all his valuable goods for no trade in return. But he learned to speak like us. And then to think like us. I wish I remembered him then.”
    Barrows smiled and nodded along. “He was a good guy. A little crazy toward the end, but a good man.” The fat pilot dug one hand into his pants pocket, produced a wad of green paper.
    The people of Mabori-teri thought of such things as decorated leaves. But Kerebawa knew better. It was the white man’s method of trade. And Barrows gave it to him.
    “Maybe you can run around the jungle in Colombia without that green stuff. But you can’t get by in America very long without it. Do you know how it works?”
    Kerebawa flipped through the bills. Some with twenty written across them, some with ten, several fives, a few ones. He nodded, uncertain.
    “I learned how to count in the mission school.”
    Barrows nodded. “Just take your time with it, it won’t go that far. Don’t spend any more than you have to. And remember, just because they’re all the same size don’t mean they’re all the same value.”
    “I know that.” Exasperated, Kerebawa grinned at the pilot, bared one eyeball by pulling down the lower lid.
    Barrows laughed and returned the American equivalent: an upraised middle finger. He stood, moved for the cockpit door.
    “Won’t be long now,” he said.
    “Could you find me something when we get there?”
    “What do you need?”
    “A map of Miami?”
    “That can be arranged,” Barrows said, and shut the door behind him.
    More tales to tell his children and grandchildren.
    Kerebawa looked at the money in his hands. Green, so green. He understood that men killed each other over it. Just as he had seen them kill for the green powder. Men, acting as savage and violent as could the hekura. Or using Angus’s word, demons.
    He wondered if they knew their name had been affixed to a powder that did far more than show visions. And if they did, if they were angered, or flattered.
    Hekura-teri . . .
    Village of the demons.

Justin’s morning after the slaughter at Apocalips was considerably less gleeful than Tony Mendoza’s. While Tony and Lupo were making sure the piranha got their Recommended Daily Allowance of white mice, Justin was finding that awakening was even more fitful than sleep.
    The bathroom mirror showed bloodshot eyes. The inside of his nose burned like a freshly paved road. His muscles were out of kink from sleeping on Erik’s couch. A queasy stomach was the least of his worries. The price of fun—he’d paid it often.
    Erik had risen fifteen minutes earlier and was fixing breakfast in the kitchen. Wearing rumpled gym shorts, Justin shuffled in and joined him.
    “It’s days