Witch Lights by Michael M. Hughes Page A

shrugged. “Don’t know him.”
    “I didn’t know him, either. But he was the chief financial officer of PEXCO.”
    “The oil company?”
    “Exactly. Oil and coal and gas, worth about a billion bucks. His wife found him in a puddle of blood with a chunk of his face blown off. Suicide. The
New York Times
had just published some details of his—what did they call it?—
unsavory
accounting practices. And there were persistent rumors of him buggering little boys at parties in LA. So everyone assumed he just offed himself.”
    Ray rolled down his window halfway. The air in the van felt stifling and stank of sweat. Neither of them had been able to shower in days. “But you didn’t believe it?”
    “Fuck no. That guy wasn’t the type to kill himself. One look at him would tell you he’d kill his own mother, his father, his kids, and his puppy before he’d kill himself. He might as well have had ‘sociopath’ tattooed on his forehead. I think he fucked up and did something they didn’t like. Or maybe talked out of class. And they—the big boys—didn’t want to take the chance on him spilling any secrets.”
    Ray nodded. “You’re probably right.”
    “I was
definitely
right. Anyway, I got obsessed with it. I moved to D.C. and found a crime reporter at
City Paper
and he helped me connect the dots. The more I looked, the more dots I found to connect. And it just got bigger and bigger and higher up the chain—politicians, bankers, CEOs. But I was getting really paranoid. I’m talking
clinically
paranoid—too afraid to leave my apartment because I knew that
they
knew I was onto them. Looking at the kid bagging my groceries and wondering if the little shit was there to spy on me. I even took apart my smoke alarm because I was convinced there was a camera in it. I started smoking coke, and then meth, which definitely didn’t help—staying up for days at a time and then crashing hard. I was doing some performances at shitty little dive bars and cafés—crazy, rambling conspiracy monologues. I was going off the deep end, and I was sure one night I’d get home and find a guy in a robe sitting in my living room. Smiling at me. And that would be the last thing I ever saw. Period. The End.”
    “But you didn’t.”
    “No. Why would they worry about me when I was busy killing myself line by line and hit by hit? I was no threat to them. And then one night I was doing my shtick at this coffeehouse in Adams Morgan. There might have been ten people in the whole place. I think most of them felt sorry for me because I was really gone at that point. They only laughed at first, until they realized I wasn’t funny—I was sick. I hadn’t eaten in days and I really felt like I was just going to snap, right there, in front of everyone—just start babbling and screaming until someone called the cops to drag me out. But then this old man comes in and sits down. Right in front.”
    “Micah,” Ray said.
    “He just looked at me. Stared right into my eyes. And then he smiled. And I knew right away that he had my number. He knew me—what I was going through and what I was doing to myself. And when I got off the stage, I went over to him and sat next to him. And he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I know what you’re going through. It’s time for you to understand.’ And I just broke down, right there in the middle of the coffeehouse, blubbering like a baby.”
    “And here you are,” Ray said.
    “And here I am. Driving a twenty-year-old VW van on the shittiest road in the shittiest part of Guatemala on my way to visit the meanest and shittiest drug kingpin south of the border.”
    Ray turned away. He was doing it all for him.
    “It’s not easy. In a lot of ways my old life, no matter how fucked up, was easier than being part of the Brotherhood. Knowing any day I could just walk around a corner and my life would end before I even knew what hit me. Just”—he mimed a gun next to his head—“pow. Game