just a game of mine. Whenever I don’t know someone’s name, I call them Robert, that’s all. So tell me. Was what he said true? Are you gentlemen really Satanists?’
Nash elected to tell the truth, not because he considered the practice to be important or valuable, but because it was time to let the weird old dude know exactly what – and who – he was dealing with.
He lifted his right hand, raising it to chest height. His eyes on the other man’s, he coughed, once.
A small glow puffed into life in his palm, at first very dim, but quickly growing into a little ball of bright orange fire, about the size of a golf ball.
The old man watched the flame. ‘Huh,’ he said, as if impressed.
‘Right,’ Nash said, closing his hand and lowering it back to his side. ‘That answer your question?’
‘I suppose it does.’
‘Good. Got any more, or are you going to leave? Or I guess you could stay, and we could beat up on you for a while. For practice. That could work.’
‘How’d you do it? The fire.’
‘It’s a gift.’
‘From whom?’
‘From him. The Dark One. For doing his work.’
‘How? What kind of thing?’
‘We pray to him,’ Nash said. ‘Every day. And we make sacrifice.’
The old man nodded as if someone was explaining an important change in the terms and conditions of his health insurance. ‘What kind? Animals? People?’
‘No.’ Nash laughed scornfully. ‘That’s retro bullshit. You do the wrong thing with the right intent, you don’t need that Dennis Wheatley crap.’
‘So what do you do?’
‘We break, we burn. We spoil.’
‘You say “we”?’
The other men watched from the background, silent, as if knowing this conversation was out of their league.
‘Me, mainly. These guys … they got a ways to go.’
‘So show me something. The kind of thing you do.’
Nash hesitated. On the one hand the situation was kind of whack. He didn’t have a clue who this guy was. Could be a cop for all he knew. But if so, he couldn’t have anything on Nash or he’d have come with back-up and guns – even assuming Miami PD kept detectives on the payroll after they got so old they looked like they should have their feet up on a porch, waiting for the grandkids to come visit so they could go to Disneyworld and waste enough money to feed an Opa Locka family for a month.
The other thing was that Nash did want to show someone, someone other than the hangers-on lurking in the shadows. He’d shown those guys what to do, countless times, but none of them was making progress. They couldn’t get it to click, and that failure was holding him back. Nash understood that it wasn’t enough to walk this road by yourself. You got status from how many you dragged along with you. It was a gift you had to keep on giving. Day after day. Night after night.
He put his hand in his jeans and pulled out a small cardboard container, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He held it up.
‘What’s that?’
Nash opened it. The interior had been padded with cotton wool. Lying in the centre was a tiny box. He removed this and held it up for the old man to see.
The man leaned forwards and squinted, seeing an intensely shiny black surface over most of the box, apart from the lid. There, someone had spent a great deal of time painting a detailed winter scene: pine trees and snow and a horse-drawn sleigh with two people on it, wrapped in old-fashioned coats and furry hats. It was so precise that it looked as if it must have been painted with a brush of a single hair, white and green with highlights of intense red and purple and dots of gold, all the more striking for the blackness of the box. It was extraordinarily shiny, too, as if coated with many coats of colourless varnish. In its detail and lustre it reminded the old man of something else, a far larger box he had once commissioned to be built.
‘And?’
‘Old guy who lives a couple blocks from here,’ Nash said, putting the tiny box carefully down on the floor. ‘I heard him talking in the store. His wife’s dying of cancer. Her mother was from Russia. The one thing she brought with her from the old country was a box like this. A lacquer box, they call it. It got stolen when this guy’s wife was a kid, but she’s remembered it all these years. Like it stood for her mom, or some shit. So this guy, he knows his wife’s dying, and he’s got cash salted away she doesn’t know about. He’s been saving all these years for the right time, putting a buck away here, fifty cents there. He figures this is the right time. So I overhear him telling all this to the guy behind the counter – who doesn’t give a crap, I mean he really could not care less – telling him that he’s blown this money, seven hundred fifty dollars, on buying one of these on the internet. Spent weeks tracking down a box like the one he’s heard his wife describe all these years. It’s her birthday in a week. He’s going to give it to her then. Or … he was. Until I paid a visit to their house, last Sunday morning when they were at church.’
‘You stole it. Nice.’
Nash smiled. ‘Right. But that’s not it.’
He raised his right foot and paused, closing his eyes as if in supplication, and then brought the heel of his boot down on the lacquer box, smashing it to pieces.
He was quiet for maybe ten seconds, relishing the moment. Then he opened his eyes.
‘That’s what he likes.’
The old man was motionless, as if listening for something. After a few moments he shook his head. ‘I got nothing,’ he said. He seemed irritated, and something else. Disconcerted, perhaps.
Nash was confused too, having anticipated a very different reaction. ‘What?’
The old man stood there, lips pursed, furrow-browed. Up until this point he’d seemed relaxed, as if their discussion had been quite interesting but no big deal. He didn’t look that way now. He looked unhappy, and thoughtful. He looked serious.
‘What’s up, dude?’
The old man glanced at Nash as though his mind was already on other things. ‘What’s up? I’ll tell you what is up. I like your style, but there’s a problem.’
‘What kind of problem?’
‘A big one. I don’t know who you’ve been sacrificing to, my friend, but he is not the Devil.’
‘Oh yeah? How do you know he’s not?’
‘Because I am,’ the old man said.
He turned to the man in the shadows who was still holding his wallet, held up a hand, and clicked his fingers.
The man exploded.
There was utter silence. None of the men standing there, sprayed though they were with blood and brains and internal organs, said a word or made a sound or moved a muscle. It was so very quiet that it seemed possible they might even have stopped breathing, until they all blinked, in unison.
‘Don’t try that at home,’ the old man said, bending down to pick up his wallet from where it had landed conveniently by his feet. ‘Otherwise, keep up the bad work.’
He walked out into the night, purposefully, a man who’d determined that it was finally time to get down to business.
The flight was OK except that a woman from the airline kept