Suicide Kings Read online

  His old house mate would follow through on the threat.

  Jackson Square

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  Michelle had been awake for several hours when Juliet and Joey showed up. The security guard let the girls in, and when the door opened Michelle could smell the olive trees, the heavy scent of the Mississippi, and beignets cooking at Café du Monde.

  “Oh, honey,” Juliet said. “You’re awake again!”

  Michelle opened her mouth, but only managed a hoarse croak. She swallowed and said, “Oil can.”

  “Oil can?” Juliet asked.

  “Fuck all. It’s a stupid joke, Ink,” Hoodoo Mama said. “ ’Member? Wizard of Fucking Oz? She needs some water.”

  “Of course,” Juliet said. “You had that tube down your throat for so long.” She hurried out, then came back a moment later with a cup and a straw. Michelle drank and she felt as if there wasn’t enough water in the world to quench her thirst.

  “Don’t drink too much, baby,” Juliet said. “The doctor said it could make you sick.”

  Michelle dropped the straw. “I’m almost indestructible,” she said. “I doubt a little water will hurt me.”

  Adesina hasn’t had water in God-only-knows how long, Michelle thought. She was just a little girl. Even a few days without water could . . . Michelle felt something warm and wet drop onto her cheek. Juliet was crying.

  “Oh, God, Juliet . . . don’t.”

  Juliet just cried harder. Michelle glanced at Hoodoo Mama—she felt guilty doing so with Juliet’s hot tears dropping on her. She shoved her guilt away and a stab of anger rose up in her.

  It was Tom Weathers’s fault that she was here and that she couldn’t bubble even though she’d spent the last couple of hours trying to. There was this insane power in her and she couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it.

  And that scared her so much she thought she might lose her mind. And then none of it mattered because Adesina was still stuck in that pit and Michelle couldn’t help her as long as she was trapped in her fat.

  Another of Juliet’s tears fell on Michelle’s head and brought her back to New Orleans. The last time she had seen Juliet, she’d gone corporate for her job with Billy Ray. Now her hair was short and spiky again. But her tats weren’t the pretty Mayan ones she’d favored in her punk days. Now they were black and tribal and aggressive.

  And then Michelle noticed that Joey and Juliet were dressed alike: both of them wore Joker Plague T-shirts and ratty jeans. What had happened to change Juliet back into a punk chick, and what had made Joey a fan of Joker Plague? Michelle knew the signs of girls who had hung out too long together. They’d gone all hive-mind. “What’s happening, Joey?” she asked. It was getting easier to talk. “Where am I? This is still New Orleans, isn’t it?”

  “Jackson Fucking Square,” said Joey. “After you ate that fucking nuke you got really big and really, really, really, really heavy. The cocksuckers couldn’t move you, so, for a while, they just put up a tent around you.”

  Michelle shook her head. Or at least she tried to. “How long have I been here?”

  “A year and change.”

  Michelle was staggered. A year. A year. A YEAR? She was cold, then hot, and then cold again. Her hands started shaking. How was she even alive after a year?

  “I know it sounds like a long time . . .” Juliet said.

  Joey interrupted her. “You just missed Thanksgiving. The city erected this temple thing over you after they couldn’t keep the tourists and grateful citizens away from your massive ass. You’re a cocksucking saint to most of the dumbasses on this planet. Except your shit-stain parents, who got you taken off life support so they could get their hands on your money again.

  “Oh, and fuck me sideways, but Tiffani’s been coming down here every chance she gets to read to you all night long. She told us you weren’t dead. Fuck me if she wasn’t right about that one.”

  Michelle tried to take a deep breath, but it didn’t work. It felt like someone had punched her in the gut. Except that that usually felt pretty good. This felt horrible. Her parents had tried to kill her.

  “You okay, Michelle?” Juliet asked. “You’re looking pale. Should we get the doctor?”

  Joey threw up her arms. “Jesus H. Motherfucking Christ on a pogo stick, Ink. She’s not dying. She just heard that her dick-lickin’ parents tried to kill her to get at her money. No one would take that good.”

  Michelle closed her eyes. She wanted to throw up. She wanted to run away. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. Was she just going to be some kind of freak for the rest of her life? A mound of flesh with so much power inside her that it hurt?

  Tears stung her eyes. She hoped that Juliet wouldn’t notice. She hated being this repulsive and she hated being so helpless.

  Sunday,

  November 29

  Paraguaçu River

  Bahia State, Brazil

  Big crocs swam the muddy river around him. As the dolphin slid through the water with near effortless undulations of his sleek and powerful body, driven by his tail flukes, he sensed them with sonic sprays emitted from his jaw, processing the echoes with the liquid mass that gave the distinctive bulge to his forehead.

  He felt no fear. For he was the baddest motherfucker in the Paraguaçu River. A dolphin had a rostrum—a beak—capable of killing great white sharks. What were overgrown aquatic river lizards to him?

  The warm fresh water had a land taste, an oleaginous feel. He reveled in it anyway. Almost reluctantly, he steered toward the island.

  As he began to break water he saw the hut waiting among mangroves, the woman on its porch, as blurs in sundry shades. Greater detail emerged as he approached, but what were mere eyes, especially in the desiccating air, against the sensory richness of sound in water?

  On his last arcing lunge he left the river’s embrace completely. The sandy silt of the bottom caressed his belly when he splashed down. It took an effort of will to will the change. When he emerged from the water, dripping water from his leanly muscled, naked bipedal form, he was Tom Weathers again.

  “Hoo,” he said, shaking water from his golden hair. “And to think that just a moment ago I was thinking of this air as dry. There’s a perspective change.” To his human nostrils the air smelled so ripely of tannin-rich water and wet-leaved mangrove forest it almost made his head swim.

  The woman laughed. His human eyes made her out clearly. Forty-something or not, a naked Sun Hei-lian was well worth seeing. “I can never get over that particular power of yours,” she called as he trudged up the gravel-paved trail from the water’s edge to the rough plank steps with the slanting late-afternoon spring sun stinging his skin from upriver. “How’d you ever get the ability to do something like that?”

  The question made his nut-sac tense up as if to crawl back in his belly. “There’s no limit to what the power of world revolution can do,” he said. “You should know that, Shang Xiao.”

  It meant “Colonel.” The world at large knew Hei-lian as an intrepid trouble telejournalist for Chinese Central Television’s English-language news service. The intelligence community knew her as a top agent of China’s well-feared Ministry of State Security: the Guojia Anquan Bu, or Guoanbu for short. Beijing had set her to seduce the PPA’s superpotent and mercurial Western ace.

  She’d succeeded so well she was now the People’s Republic’s chief advisor to its ally Nshombo, the hard-core male chauvinism of her communist gerontocrat bosses notwithstanding. And in the process she’d fallen in love with her chief subject.

  “If you say so,” she said.

  As he clomped up the steps beneath the thatch overhang of the roof she handed him an open bottle of almost self-luminous green fluid. It chilled his palm, meaning it came straight from the cooler they’d brought with them from Salvador, capital of Brazil’s Bahia state, about thirty miles downstream where the river emptied into the Atlantic. The little shack had no electricity or running water or any modern conveniences.
br />   Which didn’t seem to impair its popularity as a weekend retreat for urban baianos; getting it hadn’t been easy. Especially since Tom couldn’t exactly flash his ace powers to impress the booking agent. This was supposed to be a hideout, after all: he never spent the night in the same place twice running. That running-dog teleport Bahir was still on his case, too, and he had to sleep sometime.

  More and more he was growing reluctant to let himself sleep at all, for reasons having nothing to do with the golden-eyed Arab ace.

  Tom twisted off the cap and took a hit. The coolness suffusing outward from his throat was welcome relief after walking a mere thirty feet. Although it was “cool” only by comparison to the mind-blowing tropic heat.

  Holding a half-full beer, Hei-lian leaned against the side of the doorway, an oblong cut through warped wood to the darkness of the interior. Her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her skin, normally ivory tinged pink, glowed gold in the angled light.

  She wasn’t his usual type. He’d be the first to admit that. It wasn’t that he went for the big-boobed blond cheerleader types, especially not with augments out to here: fake tits symbolized capitalism’s obsession with conspicuous consumption. But he usually did like his women fuller-figured.

  Not to mention younger. Sun Hei-lian wore her years lightly, although he knew they’d been spent in hard service. She kept herself in remarkable shape, gymnast shape, martial-artist shape. She’d been taught taijiquan and internal martial arts by her Daoist-priest father, and more violent applications by her employers.

  She claimed he made her feel years younger. She’d laughed more in the last year, she said, their year together, than in her entire life previously. As serious as she still normally was, he believed that.

  She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met, not despite her years but because of them. And she was smart, fierce smart, a trait he respected. More than a skilled, and now passionate, lover, Hei-lian was something the Radical had never known in his brief years of freedom: a confidante.

  “You seem thoughtful, lover,” Sun said.

  He turned and leaned on the rail. Sun-heated wood stung his arms. “I miss Sprout,” he said softly. “I miss being able to have her with me.”

  “You could’ve brought her along.”

  “Would you be running around like that?”

  “Of course not,” Sun said in mock outrage. “Not in front of a child.” She came up to put her chin on his shoulder and tousle his hair. He felt the heat and yielding firmness of her body on his back and buttocks, skin on skin, the slight rasp of her bush. Unlike a lot of chicks these days she didn’t shave her pussy. Her pubic hair was on the sparse and wispy side anyway.

  As sunset approached, vast flocks of scarlet ibises, pink-pale from their season in the north and long flight back to southern summer, fell on sandbanks and overgrown islands and the dense mangal on either bank like cotton-candy rain, to feed on mangrove crabs among the tough, gnarly roots knuckling down into black water. Their cries bubbled into a sky being overtaken by bands of orange and yellow.

  With a sloshing of syrupy water a crocodile, what the locals called a jacaré, emerged from the water by the little dock. No boat was tied there now: no need for one. The jacaré was a big fucker, maybe twelve feet long. It dragged itself up by the gravel path and stared insolently at the humans from gelatinous armor-lidded eyes, as if laying claim on them for supper.

  Tom pointed. A pencil of fire stabbed from his finger and crisped a tuft of grass a couple of inches in front of the croc’s sharp snout. Moisture in plant and mud flashed to steam, scorching the animal’s nose and shooting grains of dirt against it. Opening its yellow-pink mouth to roar surprise, displaying impressive teeth, the beast wigwagged its fat tail hastily backward into the water and was gone.

  “Arrogant prick,” Tom said. He raised the finger and blew away imaginary gunsmoke.

  Hei-lian laughed. “That’s more like it. I was wondering why you brought us here to this rustic tropic paradise for the night. Other than the usual security considerations, of course. I didn’t think you went in much for that whole hippie back-to-nature thing.”

  Supernova anger burst inside him. He spun. Hei-lian leapt back like a startled cat. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he shouted in her face. “What the fuck?”

  There was more surprise than fear in those wide black eyes. But there still was fear. Colonel Sun, consecrated to service of Guoanbu and country since prepubescence, survivor of decades of full-contact play in some of the world’s most blood-soaked open sores, did not scare easily.

  But Tom was the most powerful ace on Earth, except maybe for Ra. He swatted fifty-ton main battle tanks like bugs. She knew far too well what he could do with her. “Nothing,” she said. She managed to keep her voice almost steady. “I was just making a joke. Trying. Failing.”

  The stricken look on her face stabbed through him like that Kalashnikov slug through the back. He let out a big breath. The anger had already vanished, as quickly as it had lit. It left behind a kind of clammy, shaky emptiness.

  “I’m sorry, man,” he mumbled. “Didn’t mean to rattle you like that.” You got to maintain, man, he told himself. You can find another woman. But there’s way more at stake here than that. More than he dared let anyone suspect. Not Hei-lian. Not even Sprout. More than he cared to let himself think about. Everything.

  Shaking his head, he turned back to the rail and the river and the gathering birds and evening. “I’m just a little uptight these days.”

  She was back, pressed against him, stroking him soothingly. Mingling sweat made a slick membrane between them. He respected the nerve it took her to approach him.

  “The Sudan?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, leaning heavily on the rail. “Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time.” Tom picked up the soda, now past tepid to near hot, chugged half of it. He wished he dared let himself have even one beer to take the edge off. But he didn’t. Hadn’t in the almost decade and a half since he’d . . . come into his own. Nor had he gotten stoned. He couldn’t allow himself to alter his brain chemistry. “Nshombo’s always been hung up on Muslims, especially Arabs. He remembers it was always the Arabs who encouraged the slave trade, thinks they mean to bring all that back.” He shrugged. “Shit. They even might. In South Sudan we found some local Muslims—they call themselves Arabs, even though they don’t look any different from their neighbors—keeping animist tribesmen as slaves. We gave the slave owners to their own slaves. Perfect propaganda by deed. This Caliph’s just a puppet, and Siraj is a Western wannabe. I’m cool with putting him up against the wall. But in ten years. Maybe five. When we’ve shown the world the revolution works, made this place the People’s Paradise in reality as it is in name. It’s too early. Way too fucking early.” Tom turned away to lean on the rail. “And Alicia’s pet aces . . . they’re too big a risk. Look at what happened with the last one.”

  “Dolores.” She laid a hand cool on his shoulder. “Butcher Dagon killed her.”

  Tom turned away. “Alicia’s first success story, and look how that turned out.” The sun poured in crosswise beneath the thatch awning as it sank toward the mangal and the big river’s origin in the Chapada Diamantina in the middle of Bahia state. The light had softened, lost some of its sting. But the air stayed still and hot, the humidity thick enough to swim in. The bugs, ever-present, had gone from busy to frenetic.

  Tom blew out his lips in a sigh and turned to Sun with a lopsided grin. “What say we go inside and get, you know, horizontal?”

  Jackson Square

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  And then she’s back in the pit.

  Adesina is crouched down. Her hair has come undone from its braids and is a tangled cloud around her face. She looks feral.

  Michelle glances around. Corpses. Check. Leopards. Check. Adesina. Check. No bunnies. Check.

  She closes her eyes hard and wills herself back to New Orleans.

  Juliet an
d Joey were staring at her. “What was that you were saying?” Juliet asked.

  “I wasn’t saying anything,” Michelle replied.

  “Hell you weren’t,” Joey said. “That was some fucked-up shit, Bubbles. You were talkin’ in tongues.”

  Michelle wanted to shake her head, but she only managed to move it a little. “No. That was Adesina.”

  Ink and Hoodoo Mama glanced at each other.

  “Hey!” Michelle exclaimed. “I saw that!”

  Juliet stroked Michelle’s forehead. “Sweetie, you’ve been in a coma for a year. You’re probably tired.”

  “I am not tired,” Michelle snapped. “Hello? Coma? I am plenty rested. And I’ve been having these weird dreams that I’m pretty sure aren’t dreams. No bunnies.” Michelle glowered up at them. “You can stop with the looking. I can see the two of you.”

  But then they weren’t looking at each other. They were staring at her. Any other time she might have laughed at the expressions on their faces. “What the hell? I swear I didn’t fart.”

  Juliet pointed at Michelle. “You’re bubbling.”

  Michelle looked down at her hand. A large bubble was forming on it. It glistened, iridescent and beautiful, and it felt as if it could go on for days.

  She released the bubble, and it drifted up to the ceiling. Then her hand was shaking and she thought she would lose control. A horrible nausea flowed through her again. And then the power was tearing at her. Fire in her veins. But she could bubble.

  Somewhere Over the Atlantic Ocean

  From New Orleans they flew to New York. From New York they’d fly to Rome. There they would transfer to a smaller plane bound for Addis Ababa, where they would board an even smaller plane bound for Dar es Salaam.

  Wally shook the foil packet the flight attendant had handed him a couple of hours earlier. He leaned across the aisle (Wally needed an aisle seat; people complained about sharing an armrest with a metal guy) and said, over the rumble of the engines, “Want my peanuts?”