Doubletake (35 page)

Niko did have a look for his father, though, the recrimination in the tightening of his jaw, but then it loosened into a frustrated exhalation. The man had saved his life and thought he was saving it twice. My brother had eventually learned to do practical and do it well, but he’d not grown to like it. The guilt that went with it had faded, yet a sliver would always remain. To him that would mean that if his father could feel guilt, he might be salvageable as a human being.

What people…what Kalakos had done in the past, however…they couldn’t undo. I’d go along with what Niko wanted, but I wouldn’t forget that. Kalakos didn’t have the patent on being brutally unforgiving.

I returned to the original subject. “What three things do Grimm and I have in common that let you sneak up on us?”

Niko poured the rest of the pills into a small pocket on my jacket lying between us and zipped it. The night was going to be long or short, depending on how successful or unsuccessful we were. I might need them. “First, and you said it yourself: You’re both arrogant. Grimm doesn’t think anyone or anything can take him. You’re the same, except when it comes to me.” True. Niko had taught me to fight. He knew what I’d do before I did it. Without gates, Niko could and had taken me down.

“Second: competition. Right now you use the game. When you play the game, neither of you sees anything else. You see each other, the pain, the blood. Competition blinds you to all but the game.” He was right when
it came to that too. Once I’d smelled Grimm’s blood, the rest of the bar had been lost in a fog.

He slid off the counter. “I suggest we grab an hour or two of rest before we meet your combustible contact.” The roof of the bedrooms had remained intact. The floor was wet, but the beds were dry. “Kalakos, I’ll give you a blanket if you can find something mostly dry to sleep on.”

“Hey, what’s the third one?” I asked. “You said we had three things in common.”

“I’d thought that obvious. You’re both idiots.” That wasn’t a joke. He was serious. “He taunts you; you taunt him back. Forget he’s making baby Bae right and left; it’s all about the game. Forget you might kill him and ruin his plan. Forget all those potentially life-ending, world-ending issues. ‘We’re part Auphe. We have to play. Born to play. So much fun I can’t fucking stand it.’” He quoted me with a mixture of anger and frustration.

“But you’re both lying to yourself. It’s not a game. It’s suicide. Grimm thinks he wants to take over everything, but the entire damn world? He doesn’t know that he can. He
is
smart enough to know that maybe he can’t. He’ll be a failure like he was before.” He jammed a finger into my chest. “And you think you want to stop him and this is how to do it. It takes an Auphe to beat an Auphe. You two think the game is the Auphe part of you. It’s not. The blood is. The pain is. Even the game, but you’re not playing it how the Auphe would play. The rest of it, the winner and the loser when it comes to you two, isn’t Auphe. That’s the human in you. It’s the easy way out and you know it is. The game is what you let it be.”

That wasn’t right, was it?

“Grimm would sooner die than fail again, and you think that you could’ve been Grimm, that you will be
Grimm someday. You’d sooner die than be that, to get that far. I know you don’t trust yourself, but, Cal, trust me. I won’t let it happen. That’s
my
promise.”

This time he slapped me. It wasn’t a real slap but the
Godfather
kind. The “whatta I’m gonna do with this boy?” light one. The anger was gone. The frustration remained, but it was tempered with empathy. “As I said: idiots. Using an Auphe game for a human reason.”

He opened my hand and put something in it, concealing the object until he closed my fingers around it. “You’re twenty-four, twenty-five next month. You’re a man, Cal. You have been long before you could drive. Be as practical as you were when you were four, little brother. You don’t play to win. You just
win
and screw the games.”

He lifted a bunch of the hair hanging in front of my eyes and added, “And for the love of all that is holy, will you do something with your damn hair? You can fight blind, but your chances are better if you don’t.”

Orders given, he went to his room. When his door shut, I opened my hand and saw a ring. It wasn’t the Vayash solid-silver ring of manhood. The top half was black metal and the bottom half bronze. Or the other way around, depending how you flipped it.

Black for me, bronze for Niko, and it may as well have been case-hardened steel. We wouldn’t be Vayash; neither of us would want a ring attached to that name. He might mean this as my “Leandros” ring of manhood. Niko putting the lie to the black-market monsters who accused me of being much more of a nightmare than they were. Niko denying Grimm’s games and plans and lures.

My genes didn’t matter one way or the other in what Nik knew and had always known. I wasn’t a monster.

I was a man.

He must’ve bought it from Mr. Chen before we left. It fit my middle finger, which would be at the forefront of any punch I threw. It not only said I was a man, but it was…I grinned.

Practical.

Three hours later we were going into a bakery on Melbourne Avenue. Robin hadn’t called back yet and that was beginning to worry me. Niko had called Promise to check on his condo and we were waiting to hear back from her. It wasn’t like Goodfellow. Okay, honestly, it was like him with everyone else, but not with us and not now.

The bakery wasn’t much to look at. Plain. Blue and pink cupcakes had been painted on the smallish window by hand, and not a good one. The paint was peeling now, giving them a slowly advancing case of sugar leprosy. But as with most dives, that’s where the food was the best. When I opened the door, the smell was unbelievable. Bread, pies, fudge, and ten kinds of cake. The place was called Rapture’s Buns. The paint on that was flaking too, but it wasn’t making the business suffer. The place was full of people lined up at a glass case, squabbling over who was first in line and snatching free samples off the top of the counter.

Repeat customers like me didn’t have to go through that. Rapture bumped them to the front, actually the
back technically, as soon as you walked in. She saw me as she was putting a cake in a box and handed it over to one of the guys who worked for her. They were all guys. All tough, some with prison tats, but all good-looking. Rapture liked her baking harem.

She beckoned impatiently toward the door in the back. “
Bebé
, where have you and your
hermano,
el buenorro,
been? My best customers and you desert me. Where is the
lealtad
these days? Ay, the world, she is falling apart when my children starve because your wallet is too tight to buy some of my sweets.” She didn’t have kids, but it was a good line when bargaining.

Rapture had been thrown into hooking when she was sixteen, two years after coming over from Puerto Rico. Her favorite line had been, “My name be Rapture, honey. I’m so good, sugar pie, I’ll make you see God.” I think she came up with the line first and then picked her street name. I had no idea how big she’d been then, but she was large enough now to bring her chosen name to the whole world or at least an entire continent. I had a feeling she’d been close to the same big and beautiful three hundred and fifty some-odd pounds she was now as when she’d shot her pimp’s cousin at the same time she sat on her pimp’s head and suffocated him. She said they called him Tiny Tino for a reason. It was a good story and I believed it.

After two years of hooking she’d decided it was time for a career change. She loved telling her success story. It gave hope to other whores with stupid pimps, she said. Tino had a cousin who sold weapons, and he made money Tino couldn’t dream of. And he didn’t have to give blow jobs in alleys. She watched and learned and made that profit when she brought the Rapture to Tino and shot the cousin with one of his own guns. Of course,
then it was her gun and that was a quicker profit than a BJ any day. Now Rapture was thirty-five and not the only gunrunner in the city, but one of the top ones. And she gave you a free cupcake with every purchase. How the hell can you beat that?

We’d left Kalakos driving the car around a few blocks until we were finished. With what I was buying, those random checks on public transportation these days would give a transit cop a heart attack and have us running before the government buried us so far under that the word “lawyer” was a myth.

She closed the door behind us and stripped off her baker’s jacket and hairnet. The last thing she’d want was the health department coming around and finding even the rats carried Uzis. She fluffed her curly black hair and pulled down a sequined tube top that Niko, Kalakos, and I all three could’ve stood in. “I had the boob job. What do you think? I have money. Why should I not give the angels a look at what they’re missing?”

They were perky, and as she was half an alphabet past a D cup, that made me both doubt gravity existed and think she had one damn talented doctor…who used concrete instead of silicone. “They’re…damn. I’ll bet men fight to the death for you when you walk down the street.” Hey, I didn’t want to get shot by my supplier. If they made her happy, good for her. For someone who sold guns and had put a few people six feet under, she wasn’t bad.

She hugged me thoroughly until my bones creaked and I was inhaling sequins. I heard the click in Niko’s throat he made when he was desperately trying not to laugh. His laughter was rare and I’d have wanted to hear it if it weren’t at my expense and would get him shot as well. Rapture let go of me, pulled up the glittering top again, and then waved her arms. “So? What is it you
need? Wait. My book.” Opening the book, she flipped pages and ran a finger down.

“Ah, here.
Cachorro Gruñón
.” She didn’t know any of her customers’ real names in case the police ever tracked her down. She gave us code names, and I got Grouchy Puppy, as I’d started buying from her when we’d first moved to New York. I’d been seventeen. Apparently that had gotten me “Puppy.” “Grouchy” I’d earned on my own. She always tried to get me to smile. At that point I was being chased by the entire Auphe race. I didn’t have a lot to smile about.

“Yes,
tsk
, you take vacation? You should be low on everything. Explosive rounds. Jaivin made a good batch last night. Your usual forty?”

“Nah. Thirty should do it. They’re not quite getting it done on my current job. What I really need is about twenty grenades,” I’d want some spares around if we survived Janus. “C4 with military detonators, all you have. A grenade launcher. A little more distance than my pitching arm would be a good thing.”

Her round face beamed. “With this, I might get the butt lift too. Very popular in Brazil.” She wrote a couple of check marks in her book and then, unusually, scribbled what looked like three words. “I am sorry,
Cachorro.
I sold my last grenade launcher last week. Am waiting on new batch to fall off truck. But lucky, lucky you,
bebé,
I have something that would have you spit on that. I have a thing of such beauty. For almost a year, it sits sad and unwanted on the shelf. I should know you would be the one to buy it. To appreciate the
virilidad
magnifico
.”

I knew a few Spanish words, but that wasn’t one of them. I glanced at Nik. “Virility,” he supplied dryly. That sounded right. If it swung a bigger metaphorical dick than a grenade launcher, bring it on.

She opened yet another door at the back of the room and shouted, “Marco, bring us the Javelin.”

That word I knew, and not in the Olympic throwing-competition category. “You have an antitank
rocket
?” I asked, incredulous at that as I was at the fact that her tube top was staying up.

“An antitank system.” She planted a kiss on my cheek. I could feel the thick coating of bright red lipstick. I carefully waited to wipe it off until she was focused on Niko. Do not offend the woman with the antitank system. “Your puppy brother. He has vision and like all good men knows the perfect tool for the job.”

Niko said, “You mean as a terrorist would?”

She waved her hands vigorously. “I sell to no terrorist and your brother has good heart. He doesn’t want to think so. He hides it. But one day, you will see, your brother is a hero. One day he might save the world. My
abuela
had the sight. Me some too. You will see.”

Before I could tell her she’d better get some glasses for that sight, as she was way off about world saving and hearts, she was shouting again. “Marco, you lazy, worthless bastard. I have the order of the week. Are you back there with the porno magazines pulling on your
polla
again? I told you next time I would cut it off and bake it in a turkey-apple cobbler.” That was the Thanksgiving special. “This is work time, not
pervertido
time.”

Marco was up for the list in less than five seconds and his belt was buckled in the wrong hole, pants bagging low on his hips. I wouldn’t be eating the cobbler here for a while, on Thanksgiving or otherwise. While he was back pulling the inventory, Rapture added up the bill. “Since you are good customer,
Cachorro
, I will give you discount.” That and the fact that she was having a hard time selling the antitank rocket. Discount or no, it was
about half a year’s pay. It was a good thing I’d brought almost all the cash we had on hand, because at this rate we’d be lucky to pay the six-fifty toll on our way to Tilden.

When we left, I was carrying three large bakery bags by white twine handles. Each bag had pink boxes with RAPTURE’S BUNS written in flowing white script. The boxes were cake-size but held C4, detonators, grenades, and a small box of explosive rounds. Niko was carrying the Javelin on his shoulder. It was wrapped in brown paper painted and dried ahead of time with garlic butter. As far as anyone was concerned, he was toting a piece of Italian bread almost four feet long…and close to thirty pounds.

“Grouchy Puppy.” This time Niko did laugh as we walked along the sidewalk waiting for Kalakos to come by. “She labeled you impeccably on your first visit.”