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Ice paid the tea-man with a handful of colorful Rupee-notes. His squirming vision made it damn hard to tell the denominations, but from the tea-man’s toothy grin Ice figured he’d made the man’s month. He returned the grin, then snatched up his duffel, grabbed Indy by the wrist, led her down a side-street where they’d be slightly less conspicuous. He needed to make a call on that burner phone.
“I don’t get it,” Indy said breathlessly as they hurried down the side-street even though there was no external urgency—just the frenzy of their drug-addled insides. “What are we going to do, sneak onto a passenger jet and hide in the galley?”
Ice shook his head as they stopped near a row of shuttered clothes-shops that hadn’t opened for the day yet. “Baggage hold. It’s pressurized and should be warm enough for us. They transport pet animals in the baggage hold. We should be fine.”
Indy shook her head like a pet animal in a rainstorm. “We’re going to be stowaways on a passenger flight to America? Are you crazy? We’ll be caught and arrested!”
Ice shrugged. “Possibly. But that’s only a problem if we get caught here in Mumbai. It’s a 15-hour direct flight from Mumbai to New York JFK—no layover in Europe, which makes it easier for us. So once we take off we’ll be fine. Jack and I worked a couple of summers as baggage handlers at JFK airport. I know how things work there. And I’ll give Jack a heads-up, see if he can make a couple of discreet calls to some of the union guys at JFK, maybe get them to drag their feet getting to Air India Flight 217, give us enough of a window to offload ourselves before the baggage handlers show up.”
Indy blinked twice, chewed on her bottom lip. “Well, there aren’t any U.S. military flights since we don’t have a base here. Embassy charter flights are off limits if we want to stay under the radar. But cargo flights are a possibility, aren’t they?”
Ice shook his head. “Way more scrutiny for cargo planes landing at JFK. Drug Enforcement Agency always gets their sniffer dogs on board those things before they allow offloading. And these days you’ve got Homeland Security looking for explosives or weapons being snuck into the country to arm potential terrorists. We’d get made for sure, and then we’ll be in a holding cell waiting for Benson to bail our asses out. And we can’t trust Benson right now.”
“Can we trustourselvesright now?”
Ice chuckled grimly, glanced up and down the side-street. It was mostly shuttered clothes-shops on both sides. Like most of Mumbai, the buildings were residential with retail at street level. Also like most of Mumbai, every possible parking space was occupied.
He scanned the parked cars, looking for a vehicle with dusty windows to indicate it hadn’t been moved in a while. His gaze rested on a blue Honda hatchback with tinted glass caked in more Mumbai-dust than its neighbors. “Wait here.” Ice walked over to it, checked the tires to make sure they weren’t flat, then peered in through the driver’s side window. No security system. He could hot-wire this model. He gestured with his head for Indy to come on over. “This should work.”
“We’re going to steal a car?” Indy frowned. “What about the owner?”
“We aren’t taking the car to America with us. They’ll get it back eventually. Besides, this car hasn’t been driven in weeks. They won’t miss it for a day.”
“Um, are you OK to drive? I can barely walk straight.”
Ice rubbed his stubbly chin. It still felt like straw. He glanced at his watch, then shrugged. “We have some time. We can wait a bit.”
Indy’s frown cut deeper. She chewed on her gummy-worm lips, scratched at her turkey-red neck. “Um, doesn’t this drug last 8 hours?”
“Closer to 10 hours. But the drug peaks quickly and then plateaus out. I’ll be all right to drive soon.” He grinned. “Besides, most of Mumbai drives like they’re tripping on acid anyway.”
Indy forced a smile. Then she lowered her shades and narrowed her kaleidoscope eyes at him. “Wait, why do you know so much about LSD?”
Ice took a breath, his body stiffening as he held the air inside until it got stale and his lungs started to burn with the carbon dioxide building up in his cells. He turned away from Indy, still holding his breath as that LSD-peak seemed to get higher, taking him dangerously close to that edge beyond which lay a dark mass of unresolved emotion, dense like a black hole, its gravitational pull immense and unrelenting, dragging him closer to its poison core.
“They pardoned the turkey.” Ice blurted out the words along with a harsh exhale of used-up air that emptied his lungs like a pair of popped balloons.
“Sorry, what?” Indy took her shades off all the way. “What the hell does that mean? Who pardoned what turkey?”
Ice rubbed the back of his head, then snatched off his own sunglasses so he could rub his eyes. He took another heavy breath, then put the shades back on. “Thanksgiving. Eight years ago. Jack was on his first overseas deployment with the Army. I’d just come back from my first Delta mission.” His voice trembled as he spoke, but it was coming out now, all of it, fast and hard, like that dense dark coil of emotion was unspooling, unfurling, unwinding. He swallowed thickly, turned his thankfully shaded gaze towards Indy’s puzzled face. “Got to my parents’ home just past sunset, let myself in the front door. Wandered into the kitchen, poured myself a tall glass of grape Kool-Aid from the pitcher on the counter, just like Mom always set out for me and Jack when we were kids.” He sighed. “Drank it down, poured another glassful, then strolled out the backdoor to where I could hear my folks in the yard. Which was strange, because it was Upstate New York in late November.” He paused a beat, chuckled darkly at the memory, which seemed more vivid now than the real thing all those years ago. “Found Mom and Dad sprawled outside on the frost-covered grass, eyes the size of dinnerplates, manic grins on their faces . . . just like we have right now. They declared that they’d pardoned the turkey and buried it in the yard still whole and frozen. We were having soybean steaks for dinner.” He rubbed the back of his neck, flashed a grin that wasn’t far from a grimace. “Oh, and they warned me not to drink the Kool-Aid.”
30
Indy had drunk the Kool-Aid too, and now that she knew what it was, she was starting to relish the drug’s feverish urgency, learning how to use the rabid revelations that emerged from within.
She watched the sunlight sparkle around Ice’s drawn face as words tumbled out of his blur-moving lips. She thought she could actuallyseethe sound. She understood that it was the drug producing a synesthetic effect in her brain—jumbling the neurological pathways so that sensory inputs got switched around, making vision appear as sound, making scent visible as light.
It was disorienting, but Indy somehow held on to that tiny speck of sanity which calmly whispered that she was on a drug, and she knew which drug, and it had been studied well enough that she was in no danger from anything but her own delusions, her own emotions, her own hallucinations.
Which, in a weird way, meant Indy was in control.
She rolled her tongue over her rubber-ducky lips, blinked eyelids that felt like alien wings. Ice was still talking, and Indy watched in slow-motion as his words formed puffy shapes in the air, his emotions propelling those shapes towards her like little cartoon blimps.
For a moment Indy panicked that she’d missed everything Ice was saying, that the drug had opened up something in him and it was all coming out and she was missing it all, losing her chance to get to know this man whom she felt so deeply connected to now, like there was no way anyone else in the world could understand her after what they’d just been through together. She was forever changed, and he was the only witness to her transformation.
And Indy desperately wanted to do the same for him, to be the same for him, to seal that connection which felt cosmic but incomplete, like there was still something missing, something lacking, something still to come.
Unfinished business.
