Tomorrow, the Killing

24

Twelve hours later I stood in front of a beaten-down mansion, ancient and decaying, a monument to the time a half-century past when the docks were prime real estate and not the city’s dumping ground. The late summer sun had dipped below the skyline but its residue offered some succor against the coming night. On the ramparts above me the usual line of stone gargoyles gave silent warning, half-animal figures with broken appendages and fractured leers, the population within slow to scare and quick to vandalize. The rest of the abode had gone in the same direction, product of the passive indifference and bored maliciousness of a generation of squatters. You wouldn’t have thought anything to look at it, unless you spent a few minutes watching the stream of passers-by cross the street rather than walk past.

The Bruised Fruit Mob owned a stretch of territory along the boundary between the Isthmus and Kirentown, an area so impoverished as to blur racial animosity, skin color rubbed away by the abject misery of circumstance. They bore close resemblance to a lot of other Islander gangs, smuggling goods through their section of the docks and hiring out as muscle to anyone foolish enough to take them. They had no real ties to anyone who mattered, and their activities were of the kind that tended to make a lot of noise, which in the long run is poor strategy for a criminal organization. For the moment, though, they punched above their weight, making up in sheer savagery what they lacked in resources and sanity.

A bravo lounged outside the entrance, charcoal-skinned, a curved short sword swinging from each hip. Though my visits were frequent and nothing but beneficial to his clan, still he bared back his teeth when he saw me, unable to conceive of any other greeting. I paid it little mind, shouldering him aside and descending through the door into hell.

The founder of the Bruised Fruit Mob had fancied himself an artist, as well as a thug and killer, and he’d compulsively tattooed his dreams throughout the interior in vibrant and garish colors. His initial creations were distinctly light-hearted, smiling clouds blowing gusts of wind across dancing children, an anthropomorphic sun smoking a joint and winking. As his craving for wyrm had festered, he’d painted over his visions with things far darker – horned figures engaged in ill-defined blasphemies, abortions mouthing their hatred at the world. He’d died a year or so back – choke will do that to you – and his masterpiece had begun to degrade, the results of his different periods blurring together into an infernal overlap of pigment.

The building itself had been unsafe for habitation since before its current crop of occupants had turned their teeth from the nipple. Rotting walls leaned against each other, standing solely from force of habit. The smell of decay was heavy and omnipresent, pulped wood and mildew, rainwater seeping through ceilings and into the foundations. Given the size of the structure, one would have supposed it reasonably simple to confine refuse, and for that matter bodily waste, to a specific wing or floor. One would be disappointed. Trash of all kinds lay strewn about, and the stink of urine emanated from stains on the walls.

There were five or six thugs hanging out in the hallway, passing thick spliffs of dreamvine back and forth, and laughing in a not altogether friendly fashion. They cut the chatter short when they saw me. Despite the extravagant, labyrinthine layout of their headquarters, large enough to accommodate every member of the gang and his extended family besides, the antechamber was always packed. A close-knit crew of lunatics were the Bruised Fruit Mob. This batch managed a slightly more genial greeting than their confederate outside, mumbling my name and nodding me through a wooden door painted to resemble the back of a throat.

Inside the main room was the man and his heavy, strung over a collection of furniture that had been the subject of frequent outbursts of aggression. The muscle perched precariously on a stool too small for him, sharpening a knife that would have been a sword in a normal man’s hands. It didn’t need sharpening, but he was sharpening it anyway. I could never remember his name; it was enough to know his purpose.

Adisu the Damned was stretched out on a couch, scraping his grin with a toothpick. He was young, a few years over twenty – they seemed always to be getting younger, these vice-lords and corner kingpins, though maybe that was just me getting older. Truth told he didn’t look like much – a runt of a man with bad skin and a shaved head, and eyes that were too big for their frame.

But looks can deceive. Adisu was, in fact, as hard a man as you’d ever meet, greedy and fierce, and apt to forget you were the same. He needed constant watching, else he’d try and make a play on you – it wasn’t enough that he got his end, he wanted yours as well. You needed to make sure he kept firm in his head that you were not a fellow with whom to fuck, but politely, without any outright challenge.

Because the other thing about Adisu was that he was shithouse crazy – you could see it in the way his eyes never quite settled on anything, and in the nervous movement of his hands. It wasn’t a put-on, he wasn’t mad-dogging to keep an edge on his people – there was something wrong with him, something broke. So even if you played everything perfect you still weren’t home free, ’cause at some point whatever was inside his skull would tell him to jump, it was only a question of time. I’d seen him do it once, beat a runner to death with a frying pan he’d pulled up off the fire – one minute we’re laughing and passing around a blunt, the next Adisu’s smashing bits of brain out of the poor kid’s nose. Afterward he’d said it was because the boy was stealing, but that was nonsense. There wasn’t a reason, not a real one.

The whole mob was mad for ouroboros root, they kept a simmer pot of it going on the table day and night, and it filled the air with a thin soup of hallucinogens. ‘Hello, Warden,’ Adisu said, leaning over the table and fanning back the fumes. ‘What can I do for you?’

I shook my head. ‘Close, but no ring.’

‘All right then. What can you do for me?’

‘Depends. How you feel about money?’

The half of his grin that was pure gold gleamed in the candlelight. ‘I’m for its acquisition.’

‘And the Giroies? Where do you stand on them?’

He laughed. The muscle laughed too. The muscle was well trained. ‘We love all them yellow-haired white boys. Sticky as honey, the batch of us.’

‘That’s a pity.’

‘Is it?’

I nodded. ‘’Cause I happen to know where their next shipment of wyrm is getting dropped, and if you weren’t sweethearts, you might be able to lay your hands on a quarter-stone of uncut choke.’

The muscle stopped sharpening his knife. Adisu stretched back against the couch, stroking a tuft of padding that stuck out through the torn leather. ‘Now that you mention it,’ he said, ‘I fucking hate the Giroies.’

‘Tomorrow night, around one, a skiff will dock at the tip of the Sugarland Pier. Some men will get off it. Other men will meet them.’ Or at least that was what had been written on the sealed note Tibbs’s man had brought by the Earl that afternoon, brought it and waited while I read it, then watched as I held it over a candle.

‘Yeah?’

‘That’s the plan at least. Of course, sometimes plans have a way of not working out.’

‘Security?’

‘I doubt it’s being escorted by nuns, but last I checked you don’t run a monastery.’ I’d been doing my best not to take in any of the frying root, but a fellow can only go so long without breathing. I could feel it buzzing at the base of my brain stem, and my tongue felt slow and swollen. A pair of fornicating demons on the back wall stopped their lovemaking to turn and leer at me. Above them an intricately detailed portrait of the Lost One wept tears of blood that trickled down the walls.

‘Where’s your end in this?’ Adisu asked.

‘Say a third of what you get from selling off the stash.’

‘Say a fourth.’

I nodded ascent. I didn’t so much care about the money – for my purposes the only thing that mattered was that there wouldn’t be any Giroies left to talk up who’d hit them. But then the Bruised Fruit Mob had a well settled ‘no survivors’ policy, and I didn’t think I needed to voice my concern.

‘The Giroies . . .’ Adisu began. ‘They probably wouldn’t be happy if they found out a crew of inks made off with their stash.’

‘Why, you thinking of telling them?’

Adisu rested his chin against his hands, weighing his options silently. A silhouette of my mother on the back wall reached out her hands to me, sympathetic and disappointed. I blinked her away. ‘What you think, Zaga?’ Adisu asked.

The muscle let the sword fall from his hand, its weight wedging the tip into the floorboards. ‘Set up,’ he said, beady eyes snarling in a skull the size of a coconut.

‘But on whom?’ Adisu reached over and pulled his man’s weapon out of the wood. ‘You know Warden here used to be an agent? High up in it too, from what I hear. Made sure the Dren didn’t swoop over the bay and pillage the city. Protect the country and shit.’ He made a mocking little salute. ‘He still thinks like that, like we was pieces on a board. He wants us to play the hammer on some poor set of motherfuckers.’

‘We gonna do it?’ the muscle asked.

‘Hell yeah, we gonna do it. ’Cause the Warden, he makes sure the angles meet. We just little fish, ain’t nothing he wants to concern himself with. If the take ain’t square or if the Giroies are waiting for us . . .’ He gestured with the blade. ‘There’s gonna be trouble, trouble our man don’t need. And he’s too smart to make trouble for himself.’

Adisu the Damned would be dead in six months – no one could hold to his narcotic regimen indefinitely, and he ran his boys too hard, and he was too fond of close-in work. But none of that changed the fact that he was half a genius, sharp as the steel he was holding.

‘One o’clock, Sugarland Pier,’ I reminded him.

‘I’ll make a note of it,’ Adisu said, bright-eyed and smiling.

I pushed myself up from the chair, unsteady from the smoke but trying to hide it. False, horrifying things swarmed the walls like crabs overflowing a barrel. The first man I’d ever killed waved hello to me, a boy really, grinning at me beneath a caved-in skull, pink oozing out the hole I’d made. Soon he was joined by a host of others, slit throats and burned bodies, corpses barely remembered, all standing abreast, laughing silently and gesturing for me to join them.

‘What you got against the Giroies?’ Adisu asked, breaking me out of hallucination.

‘Absolutely nothing,’ I said honestly, then fell on out.