Which was the point when Nijinsky’s phone lit up with the text from Keats and Plath. “Read this to me,” he told Wilkes, and handed her the phone. Then added, “Please.”
“Have taken AFGC guy possible name Burnofsky. Instructions?”
Wilkes read him the text and burst out again with her weird, hehheh-heh laugh. “Go Keats. Capturing some bad guys. I’d do Keats in a heartbeat. What about you, Jin? You hot for our English friend?”
Nijinsky veered toward an exit that suddenly presented itself. They parked at the far, dark end of a Hardee’s parking lot. Nijinsky sent a text to Lear.
“Can’t make that decision yourself, Jin?” Wilkes asked. He sent a text back to Keats. Hold him. Awaiting instructions.
He decided against answering Wilkes’s barbed remark because he was asking himself the same thing. Would Vincent have handled that himself? Was this an example of Nijinsky being the wrong person?
He glanced at the navigation system as Vincent once more yanked on his chains and said something like, “Hurrrr!” Forty minutes to go, and that was if there was no traffic.
He was in a van with a crazy girl, a raving lunatic, and a woman who probably wanted to kill him. In the parking lot of a Hardees. In the middle of God knew where in the dark. Waiting for instructions from a man or woman or for all he knew computer program to tell him to live or die, kill or be killed.
People were pulling into the drive-thru, getting burgers and fries and shakes. Normal people with normal lives. A family, two fathers and their two girls sat in a Subaru wagon, pointing at the neon menu, and Nijinsky thought for a
moment that in another universe that could be him.
How in hell had he ended up here, doing this, with these people? He had wanted a little adventure, a sense of doing something mysterious and important. He wasn’t even a gamer; he had come to BZRK because of a chance meeting with Grey McLure at some stupid society party where Nijinsky had been invited as eye candy.
Somehow he had fallen into conversation with McLure, and before he knew it he was telling McLure his life story.
“You’re too smart to just walk around looking good in a tux,” McLure had said.
“Maybe, sir, but that’s my skill set.” At the time he’d halfway thought McLure was hitting on him. He wouldn’t be the first straight guy to consider a little experimentation.
But no, that wasn’t it. McLure had found something genuinely interesting in Shane Hwang, underwear model and party tux-wearer. Finally he’d asked McLure straight out why he was paying attention to him.
McLure tilted his head, looked at him and said, “You have no family, you have no connections, really, you have no direction. You strike me as a gentle person, but not weak, very intelligent but unfocused.”
Nijinsky had frowned. “Is this a job interview?”
“I know someone who may need a young man like you, Mr Hwang. This person needs a sort of, well, I don’t quite know the word for it. He needs someone to be a right hand to a young man who is very talented and in a leadership position but is not good at handling people.”
“Like a personal assistant?” The idea had disappointed him.
“No. Like a brother in arms. Like a balance. Yin to his yang.”
“It doesn’t sound like—”
“Your life would be in danger. Your sanity would be at risk. You would see things, and do things …unimaginable to you now.” McLure had smiled. “You would have purpose. You would be doing very, very important work . . .”
Nijinsky saw that the Subaru family had finally gotten their order straight. He sighed.
The yin to his yang, or was it the other way around, he could never remember, was chained in the seat behind him. Kerouac was mad. Renfield was dead. Ophelia was dead. And unasked for, Nijinsky was in charge. He had never wanted it, not for so much as a millisecond. He’d been a good second in command to Vincent.
But he had never—
An app opened on his phone, unbidden.
Suddenly he was looking at a night-vision shot of the common room in the New York safe house, taken from one of the security cameras.
Men in Kevlar vests and helmets were in the room, swinging their weapons left, right, looking for opponents.
“They’re hitting the New York safe house,” Nijinsky said, then regretted it because Wilkes was all over him in a flash, wanting to see.
“Goddamn!” Wilkes said, twisting his hand so she could see the phone better. “They missed us by what, three hours?”