Bio-Justice Read online

  Stepping outside, Danny could see the sidewalks were already crowded. He lit a cigarette as he waited at the bus stop. It took two buses packed with commuters, shoving and entitled, before he was able to board. He was jostled to the middle of the vehicle where everyone’s face had the look of straining tolerance as if they were doing slow counts in their heads as to when they would be able to disembark from the daily ordeal.

  Danny walked eight blocks to the rendezvous point, a coffee shop off Schermerhorn Street, close to downtown. Joey had changed his mind and decided it was better for Danny to meet the kid at a place away from the shop.

  He was early. The meeting was set for nine-thirty and it was ten minutes to nine. Danny sat in a booth and told the waitress he was expecting someone so she wouldn’t get pissed that he was taking a whole booth for a cup of coffee.

  By nine-forty, the waitress was eyeing Danny because the coffee shop had filled up and he was still taking up one of her valuable stations. He asked for a second refill.

  The waiting seemed too long now. He was late, this kid. Five, ten minutes—OK. He wasn’t going to make a fuss over that, but when Danny looked at his watch and it read five minutes after ten, his stomach tightened. The waitress, at least in his mind, seemed to be passing his booth every other minute.

  Then came the graceless voice. “What the hell happened to your face?”

  “Bar fight. Three to one,” came the pre-rehearsed reply.

  Danny looked up at the young man, dressed way more casually than one would if they were trying to make a good impression. He was lean and tall, with a shock of shiny, curly black hair as if he had just stepped out of a shower. His face was unshaven for at least two days and his eyes were both sharp and disinterested, at least as far as Danny as a subject was concerned.

  “Danny Fierro. I didn’t get the name,” Danny prompted.

  “Zack.”

  “As in Zack…”

  “As in Zack Coultas. As in ‘I don’t know what that information is going to do for you’.”

  Danny had risen in his seat to shake Zack’s hand but after receiving the indifferent handshake, he sat back down. Zack took the seat across from Danny and immediately pulled out his phone and checked his calls.

  “You’re late,” Danny said.

  “Sorry,” Zack said, putting away his phone, “I overslept.”

  “From where I come from, someone saying something like that is showing a level of disrespect.”

  Zack’s face wrinkled, but just slightly. “Whatever.”

  Danny had such hopes and a few seconds in, he already hated this kid’s guts and imagined pistol whipping the smugness off his face. “Well, listen. Joey asked me to meet with you to show you a few things. I used to be pretty good at the game and well, he thought it might do you some good if I spent some time with you.”

  “Like what?”

  “What?”

  “Like what are you going to show me?”

  Danny knew this was a question where the answer was going to be rejected no matter what he said. But he took the next step.

  “Let’s start with locks and alarm systems. Most of the systems are going to add critical time to the jack and time is exactly what you don’t have. It’s going to boil down to—”

  Zack sighed out loud. “How long?”

  “How long what?”

  “How long am I going to have to sit here and listen to this?”

  Danny was beyond pistol whipping Zack in his thoughts. Now he was emptying the pistol in this stupid punk’s face, distorting his sneer with a couple of well-placed bullet holes. “I’m sure some of this you’re going to know already. But we should start from the beginning.”

  “Look, I’m sure you could tell me some rip-roaring tales from the good ol’ days and I can appreciate what you think you can pass along to me but it’s a waste of time. I’m sure Joey meant well but I’ll talk to him.”

  “Listen,” Danny said, “everything I know, I learned from someone smarter than me, who had done it before. I had to be open to the fact that I didn’t know everything. If you’d just put a check on your ego, you’d be surprised how much you could benefit.”

  Zack smiled for Danny had given him the justification to blow him off without a thought. He knew how he would explain it to Joey. This old man, this fossil—he was just clueless.

  “Let me tell you something, Danny,” Zack started.

  The waitress came around when she saw Danny’s guest had finally arrived. She put down a place setting for Zack.

  Zack held out his hand. “I’m not staying,” he said.

  The waitress snatched up the place setting while scowling at Danny. “We have a counter, too. Just so you know,” she said before leaving them.

  Zack continued, fixing Danny with his eyes, making sure he saw every bit of contempt and condescension there. “You have nothing for me.”

  Danny was seeing his opportunity slip away. “Look, let’s get some fresh air. We’ll get in your car and we can go through a few scenarios.”

  “Listen, codger. Get it through your head that you can’t teach me anything. Nothing. I’m here as a favor to Joey but now I’m done. I’m sorry I wasted your time almost as much as I’m sorry that you wasted mine.”

  When Zack rose from his seat, Danny grabbed Zack’s hand in desperation. “You think I’m some old fuck with nothing relevant to teach you? I’m no older than you. I went through that fucking Bio-Justice. I’m no older than you!”

  Zack ripped his hand away from Danny’s grip and laughed. “Fuck. You’re even worse than an old man. What are you going to teach me, Danny? How to get caught? How to get in a bar fight and have my nuts handed back to me?”

  Danny stood up, reached over the table and grabbed Zack again, this time by the collar. Zack just smiled until Danny, looking defeated, let him go.

  After Zack left, Danny sunk back in his seat. The waitress, who had seen everything from a distance, left Danny alone until he finally got up a few minutes later and asked for the check.

  Over the next few weeks, Danny showed up for work at Henry’s Diner, fastened his linen apron and put his head down, not speaking to anyone, except when he was specifically addressed about a work-related matter. A couple of the waitresses who had been concerned when Danny had shown up after his beating, decided to avoid any small talk with him when it was clear, by his body language and lack of eye contact, that he wanted to be left alone.

  Danny’s face slowly began to heal—even the painful attacks in his stomach began to subside. But he felt nothing inside, just a maw of emptiness that kept him floating just above the surface of consciousness. And as he lay in his bed at night, sometimes recklessly with a cigarette’s orange ember the only visible thing in the infinite darkness, Danny became a still thing, totally absent of movement, as if motion was the consequent expression of living. And if someone were to ask Danny what he was thinking about in those still, waking hours in the dark, he would not know what to say. It was as if existence required the intention to be conscious. And Danny barely knew he was there.

  CHAPTER 12

  Danny found Pete down that narrow shadowy street away from Hodge Memorial. Pete saw him coming and smiled as if he had made a bet with himself as to exactly when Danny would show up.

  “What is it?” Danny demanded to know.

  “I told you,” Pete said benignly as he examined the remnants of Danny’s angry purple bruises.

  “What are you selling?” Danny pressed.

  “I’m selling youth, brother. Youth, virility, strength…”

  “It makes you feel younger?”

  “It doesn’t make you feel younger. You become younger. For a short while anyway.”

  It all sounded crazy but Danny didn’t care about logic or reason. “Twenty dollars, you said?”

  “Hurry, hurry, the sale ends soon!” Pete crooned like the voiceover of an annoying TV commercial. “Last chance! Everything must go!”

  Danny thrust his twenty do
llars into Pete’s waiting hand. Grinning, Pete retrieved the vial from his jacket and held it up like liquid platinum. Danny snatched it as Pete motioned him down the street. “Let me take you somewhere where you can have a little privacy.”

  The abandoned industrial building was an old printing shop shuttered three years ago. Now it was just a large room filled with scavenged machines and piles of discarded garbage and rubble. Pete seemed to have a key or he knew how to jimmy the lock open. Either way, they were inside within seconds. There was a filthy mattress in one corner of the room and Pete fanned out his open hand to the accommodation. An unlit candle and a bucket of tap water were next to the soiled mattress. Pete handed Danny a syringe and turned to leave.

  “I’ll close the door,” Pete said. “Guys get a little loud after they use it. You don’t want to attract the cops.”

  After Pete was gone, Danny sat on the mattress and washed his arm with the water in the bucket. Ever since his aging, the veins in his arms were more prominent and there was no need to fashion a tourniquet. The serum was now in the syringe and he injected all of it. Lying down, Danny closed his eyes and he was still for a few moments.

  He heard himself moan and then suddenly, his lungs couldn’t capture enough oxygen. His chest rose up and down violently and then he was screaming, with pain that was hollowing himself out as if Drano was coursing through his veins.

  Grabbing a dirty linen rag that littered the floor, Danny stuffed it into his mouth and bit down, trying to muffle his horrible screams. From his eyes, he saw his vision whirling like a carousel that whipped around, stopped, and whipped around again and again. He was gripped with a paralyzing nausea and every attempt to get up from the mattress was futile.

  Finally, Danny blacked out, for just how long he could not be sure.

  By the time his consciousness returned, the room had gotten darker, casting longer shadows over the crumbling debris. Danny rose from the mattress. He felt strangely better. There was a sense of restored energy, of vigor he had not felt for the longest time. He stepped amidst the dusty hulks of broken machinery and the smashed pieces of plaster and concrete, and discovered a small mirror against the far wall.

  Cautious, even slightly afraid, he crept up to the mirror. Danny’s face looked younger—not dramatically but noticeably. The wrinkles were finer and his hair had more dark streaks amongst the white. He touched under his eyes where the pouches were less pronounced now. He took a roundhouse swing with his arm, then another. Soon, he was shadow boxing, reveling in his combinations of punches, faster and with more power behind them.

  And most of all, Danny noticed, when he looked into the mirror again, the sharper light had returned to his eyes.

  “Where do you get this shit?”

  Pete backed up. “I have a supplier,” he said. The smile was gone from his face, indicating the code Danny had breached by his aggression.

  Danny now grabbed the young pusher by the collar. “I want to meet him.”

  “Get your fucking hands off me,” Pete snapped.

  “How long does it last?” Danny asked, releasing him.

  Pete found his smile again. “Feels good, huh? I told you. It’s a little sip from the Fountain of Youth.”

  “How long?” Danny repeated.

  “Not long. Twenty-four, thirty-six hours. Then you’re back on the walker.”

  “I want to meet your supplier,” Danny said, grabbing ahold of Pete’s shoulder.

  “Hey, let go!”

  Now that Danny felt stronger, he also felt bolder in his aggression. “I want to—”

  Pete’s fist was clenched around a .45 automatic which he now pressed against Danny’s left temple. “I did ask you politely.”

  Danny released his grip. Pete shook himself loose but kept the gun trained on Danny.

  “How much for more?” Danny said.

  Pete looked up, pretending to consult the little calculator in his head. “For what I gave you—two C notes.”

  “Two hundred? You must be crazy.”

  “What can I say? That’s the price. No haggling allowed.”

  “I don’t have that kind of money,” Danny said.

  Pete shrugged. “Then break into someone’s house. Hold up a bank. Push an old lady over and take her purse.”

  “If I got caught, they could age me into the grave,” Danny said, although up until that moment, he had never considered that possibility.

  “That’s your problem,” Pete sighed.

  “You son of a bitch,” Danny said weakly.

  Pete released the hammer on his .45, the gun slipping back into his jacket like a receding cobra. “It feels good to feel young, doesn’t it? You didn’t know how good when you had it.”

  It was when Pete started to laugh derisively that Danny turned and walked away.

  As evening fell, Danny became obsessively aware of the clock, of the minutes ticking down the serum’s effect. He figured he had another twenty-four hours with not a moment to squander. He entered a cheap bar he had passed many times but never entered, and persuaded a drunken woman to go home with him. The woman had overly-porous skin and crooked teeth and she kept talking nonsense about her girlfriend who was a big-shot success, who had started her own internet company and wanted this pickled lush to partner up with her. Danny stripped the woman of her clothes and he mounted the overripe body and pistoned into her feverishly until he was spent. After they lay beside one another for a short while, Danny opened her legs again. The woman finally insisted on leaving because she wanted to sleep and Danny wouldn’t let her.

  “Man, you just wanna fuck,” she slurred. “You’re acting like it’s the end of the world—”

  “Stay,” Danny said. “Please stay.”

  The woman waved him off as she grabbed her bra off the floor. “I gotta get some sleep, man.”

  “Go ahead and sleep. I won’t bother you,” he said.

  The drunken woman smiled and flopped back onto Danny’s bed. A few seconds later, she was snoring with her mouth open and Danny pulled the covers over her. He dressed himself and left his apartment.

  On the street, the sidewalks were populated with clusters of people smoking, laughing and telling loud meandering stories. It was eleven o’clock and Danny noticed he still felt the energy in his quick step. He lit a cigarette and smelled the alcohol and the sex that had been absorbed in his skin.

  After a few blocks, Danny felt his legs holding him back. He was getting tired and he wanted to lean against the lamp post.

  It was wearing off.

  And it had only been eight hours, nine tops. Lying bastard! But then, what did he expect from a drug dealer—Sunday School promises? He was breathing harder and he felt his body craving the energy that was dissipating from him. Sweat popped on his forehead and his hands trembled.

  He found an all-night donut shop and had coffee to calm himself. Danny watched the procession of nightcrawlers coming into the shop after battling insomnia or topping off the evening after a night at the club. He scratched at his bandage which had started to itch and flexed his hand so he could feel the pain there.

  Once outside again, the sky opened up and a light drizzle fell. Danny zipped up his jacket and kept walking, but noticeably slower now. He was as he was before and he found himself wanting answers to questions that had floated about in his brain since he first met Pete. He made his way back to the street where Pete had first approached him. Danny peered into the building where he had lain on the mattress in the shadows screaming. The door was locked now and he moved on. The drizzle seemed to subside momentarily.

  Danny observed several men walking along the pathways where he had expected to see none. They were mostly his current physical age, shabby in appearance, some bent, some shuffling, some staggering. Yes, they were exactly like him. He wanted to stop one and ask if he had gone through Bio-Justice. And yet there were so many, stumbling about like zombies heading nowhere in particular—aimless, soulless creatures of the night. But how could that be? Un
less there were many more reposited beings than had been disclosed, from earlier test groups, dumped on the street—perhaps the homeless, the alcoholics, the drug users, the mentally ill. Danny watched these creatures, this human wreckage, and did not wish to identify with them any longer. He wanted the serum, that was all. No, he told himself, he wasn’t at all like these lost souls.

  He came upon a bar on this ghostly street—more of a dark warren—built into a storefront that had once sold plumbing supplies. The doors were open so Danny could peer inside. It was pitch dark but the television affixed above the counter gave off a glow that counted the heads inside the place, bobbing and nodding quietly. The television was on a news station and a Congressional candidate was giving a speech. The candidate’s voice was brittle and the crowd of men in the dark grumbled.

  “Where were my opponents when it came time to stand up and be counted on Bio-Justice?” the candidate demanded. “They said more research needed to be done, their bleeding hearts would have had this great city overrun with violent criminals. I stood alone, unafraid of any repercussions and recommended Bio-Justice be implemented immediately and to all fifty states. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if you take away the years of a man’s life, instead of putting him up at some country club prison, you have a real deterrent, real criminal justice…”

  Danny had heard enough and moved past the bar. He had not gotten much farther along when he spied a conspicuous movement coming from a cracked opening in a boarded up storefront. A disheveled looking man in his late fifties popped out uncomfortably and hurried down the street. Danny felt a tingle, as if an improbable wish had just been granted.

  The disheveled man hobbled into an alley cul-de-sac. Danny felt it start to drizzle again. He hurried to catch up to the man, the drizzle making patting sounds on the surfaces of the alley masking his footsteps. The alley was black ink to the eyes except for the spots of light coming from hulking street lamps. Suddenly, Danny was a few steps behind, his shadow looming past the man ahead of him, bleeding into one of those spots of light. The man turned his head behind him, wild-eyed at the sight of Danny closing in. Breaking into a run, he did not get far before Danny was upon him, kicking him in the soft of his belly. The man made noises that sounded like a child caught by bullies. Danny grabbed him, pulling him up to face him.