Joe Pitt 3 - Half the Blood of Brooklyn (22 page)

--Not what you really need, is it?

She eases closer, her thigh against mine.

--No, not what you need at all.

She reaches a hand into the front seat and Sela places a butterfly knife in her palm.

I shove myself into the corner of the seat.

Amanda puts a hand on my wounded knee.

--No, it's
OK,
Joe. It's really OK.

She flips the knife and twirls it and the blade and the handles flutter and she snaps the
handles tight under her fingers and shows me the blade.

--Sela taught me that. Cool, huh?

She looks at Sela.

--Is there time?

--There's time.

Amanda lifts a black denim-wrapped leg and swings it over my lap and settles there.

--That OK? Hurt anywhere?

I pull my face back, away from her and her smell.

She twirls the knife and stabs it into the white leather upholstery I've already smeared
filth over. She grabs the bottom of her sweater and pulls it off and tosses it aside and
draws the knife free of the seat back.

She adjusts the strap of her black tank top and looks down at the knife.

--It's not
that
weird, Joe. It
isn't.
You did something for me once. I just want to do something for you. I just want.
Well.
Just let me do this for you.
Please.

She puts the blade to the palm of her hand and slices across it and the blood comes and
she puts it in front of my face.

--Please, Joe. I'll beg if you want. Please.

But she doesn't have to beg, I'm already drinking.

And when I start to bite and try to widen the wound and she gets scared and pulls free and
tumbles off my lap, it's only because Sela is in the car that I don't break her in half
and drink the rest.

Amanda plays with the ivory cameo hanging from the black velvet choker around her neck,
the bandage Sela applied wrapped tight over her hand.

--She
must
have a thing for you. Lydia must have a
thing
for you.

I look forward and catch Sela's eyes in the rearview and she looks back out the
windshield, starts the T-bird and pulls out of Shinbone onto Great Jones.

Amanda reaches out and squeezes Sela's shoulder.

--Laugh if you
want
to, baby, but dyke or no dyke, she just
must
have a thing for Joe. I mean, come
on,
this is
what,
like the second time she's bailed him out? And that's
not
even counting when she hid
me
from Dexter Predo. She's got a
total
straight crush on him.

Sela pats the girl's hand.

--Sweetheart, the woman wouldn't know what to do with a man.

Amanda takes her hand away.

--That's just
stupid.
She would
too.
And you can act like she'd never go there, but people are weirder than that. I mean, look
at
us.
And I
don't
mean me. I'm a poor little rich girl orphan whose father was a pederast and whose mother
was a tramp, of
course
I fall in love with a chick with a dick. But all you ever
wanted
was a boyfriend who'd treat you like a
woman
and instead you end up with a little girl who treats you like, well, Joe doesn't want to
hear
what I treat you like.

She ruffles her hair.

--Any
way,
that's not the point. The
point
is she likes him. Whether she wants to or not.
That's
how it works. I mean, come
on,
would you have fallen for me if you could have helped it?
Please
don't tell me it didn't fill you with just a little self-loathing when you first realized
you had a thing for me. The little
lost
girl. The innocent you had vowed to protect.

Sela maneuvers the long car around a double-parked delivery van.

--I got over it.

Amanda scratches the back of Sela's neck with her fingernail.

--Yes you
did.

She takes a jar of olives from the bar compartment and twists the lid off.

--Me, I never
had
any question about what I felt. First time we were in the sauna together I
knew
I had to have you.

She plucks an olive from the jar and pops it in her mouth.

--My
God,
Joe, have you ever seen her naked? You are missing
out.

Sela ducks her head.

--Stop it.

Amanda wiggles her finger into the hole of one of the olives.

--Am I embarrassing you, baby?

She leans forward and wraps her arm around Sela's neck and puts the olive at her lips.

--Are you blushing?

Sela sucks the olive from her finger and Amanda giggles and falls back in the seat.

She holds the jar out.

--Olive?

I don't say anything and she shrugs and closes the jar and puts it away.

She moves close and leans on me.

--You'll
get
over it.

She perches her chin on my shoulder.

--
Not
just drinking my blood, I mean.

She puts her cheek to my arm.

--I mean family. I mean what it's like to have
family.
That's what we're gonna make, Joe. Family. Sela and me, we talk about it
all
the time. Right, baby?

--That's right, hon.

--Like, how the Clans, they're
just
organizations. They treat everybody like they need the
Clans
more than the Clans need
them.
Which you
don't
even need to think about to see that it's
so
wrong. But we're gonna be different. We're gonna treat everybody like family.

Sela has the car pointed east, taking us back the way we fled, heading for the avenues
that will run us to the Upper East Side.

She brakes for a stoplight.

--It's true, we're going to start a new Clan. No dogma. No enforcers. No racial barriers.
No superstitions. Just support. Just a place for everyone who needs family to have it.
Know why it's gonna work? Because Amanda and me are going to be running it. Infected and
uninfected. Together.

Amanda tilts her head back to look up at me.

--It's going to be called
Cure,
Joe. That's what we're calling the Clan. So everyone will
know
what we're doing. What we're working for. Cuz there're
so
many that need it. And not just for the
obvious
reasons. Think about it.
Sela,
if she ever went to go post-op and get her
equipment
changed. And
I
am voting
against
that. If she ever did, know what would happen? They'd cut her dick off and do
all
that work and the Vyrus would treat it like a
wound
and heal it. Not, like, grow her a
new
one, just close up the hole between her legs. Leave her with, like, a
patch.
Gross. So, yeah, infecteds want a cure.
Lots
of them. But they also want other things.

She wraps her fingers around my arm and squeezes.

--We'll be a family. We'll all
take care
of each other. And I'll have more money than
God
pretty soon and can make sure
everyone
has the blood they need. And in a few years, I'll have a cure. Because there
has
to be one. It's
just
a virus. No matter how you
spell
it. It's biological and science can explain it. And I can cure it. You just have to
isolate it and study it. You have to know it. Be with it. Get inside it. I can
do
that.
Daddy
couldn't. But I can.

She reaches up and runs a finger over the healing cuts that cover my face.

--Lydia
told
Sela what you did. That you tried to save your
girlfriend.
That's
got
to suck. And now you're alone again. But you don't
have
to be. Nobody should be
alone
if they don't
have
to be. So
what
if we're not
normal
? Normal bites. We can have our own kind of family. All we
have
to be is strong enough. I think you're strong enough, Joe. I
really
do. And you don't have to be my daddy or anything. Just, what
ever,
my big brother or something.

She plants her face tight against my arm.

--I just,
gah,
I
love
you no matter
what.

I look at her.

She's young and healthy and rich and brilliant and beautiful. And her blood is tonic.
She'll spoon-feed it to me if I ask because she's as crazed as her parents ever were and I
helped her once and she thinks that's love.

Shit. Maybe it is. Like I'm a fucking expert.

It would be easy. An easy life. Can you imagine such a thing?

But Evie would still be in the warehouse.

And I've had a family. One was enough.

I shrug off the girl and push the passenger seat forward and lean and yank the door handle
and the door swings open and Sela is rounding onto Park Avenue South and I roll from the
car onto the pavement and find my feet and limp into Union Square and hide in the tent
city of the homeless until Sela pulls the crying girl back to the car and drives off with
her.

On the border of Society and Coalition, the park is not safe.

I walk back onto Society turf.

No one will be looking for me. I couldn't be so stupid as to come back here after what
happened at the Society safe house. They'll be locking up tight and stripping the house
and piling out the back, leaving wreckage that cops will read as a drug deal gone bad.
They'll be busy setting up shop at one of the buildings Terry bought with the Count's
money. The money he no longer has.

I have time.

I believe that right up until I stand at the corner of Second Avenue and 10th Street and
see the fire engines two blocks away and the flames pouring out the windows of my
apartment.

Exile, I head south, away from home.

--A nail in the leg?

I take the beer Christian offers me and suck half of it down.

--And one in the foot.

A few Dusters move around the clubhouse garage. One cracking the gearbox on his Indian,
another throwing knives at a paper cutout of bin Laden, two are rewiring an old component
stereo system they found scrapped in a dumpster.

Christian sits down on the edge of a fat, balding tire from an old dune buggy he's been
tinkering with for a year.

--And she really shot Hurley?

--Yeah.

--And took a crack at Terry?

--Yeah.

--And left them both alive?

--Yeah.

He drinks some beer.

--Jesus. Dead she-male walking.

--Yeah.

The guys with the stereo twist a last couple wires together at the back of a speaker and
open the clamshell top of the turntable and drop a vinyl disk on the spindle. It's
Television's
Marquee Moon.
See No Evil plays.

We listen to the song.

Christian taps the heel of his boot.

--The classics.

--Sure.

He stops tapping his heel.

--A
nail.

--
Two
nails.

--Fuck me.

--Yeah.

He works a hand inside his leathers and pulls out a pack of Marlboros and offers it to me.
I take one and break the filter off and find my Zippo and light up.

He takes a light from me and blows a smoke ring.

--You're fucked.

--Yeah.

--Tenderhooks made a run up to Fourteenth right before dawn. Said the fire was out at your
place. Said partisans were out.

--Yeah. No doubt.

He's not wearing his top hat. The crown of his head is bald and weathered. He scratches
it.

--Seem to you like it's getting weirder out there, Joe? Scarier?

I look at the big roll-up doors that block out the killing sun on the other side.

--It's getting weirder. Scarier? I don't know.

He spits between his boots.

--Feels scarier to me. Like shit that's been building up is about to cut loose.

--Terry says there's war coming.

He smears the saliva across the floor with the toe of his boot.

--Shit.

--Yeah. Shit.

He looks over at me and smiles.

--He mention that before or after you stuck the nails in him?

--Must have been before. He wasn't waxing too conversational after.

He leans in and clinks his bottle against mine.

--Tell you, man, I would have liked to see that. Smug bastard that he is. I would have
liked to see his blood.

--Just like anybody else's.

--Would have liked to see it for myself.

We drink another couple beers and someone flips the album.

I flex my knee and it hurts like hell, but not as bad. The ribs are burning as the Vyrus
heals. Some are gonna knit crooked. The cuts and holes are all coming together, along with
whatever Lydia did inside my gut, and I'm starting to see some blurs from my burned eye.
Still, I only got two pints off the girl. Enough to get me going and to make her talk
crazy talk, but I could use some more.

Who couldn't use some more? We all want more.

I think about her. Young and hungry. I know how that feels. Even if it was a long time
ago.

Clan Cure.

God I hope the name is all about what she's trying to do and not about the fucking band. I
hate that band.

Like the name matters.

They'll never let her get away with it.

But.

More money than God. Business and legal hooks deep in the straight world. Knowledge of
things she has no right to. That no one has a right to. And a woman like Sela at her side.
Love at her side.

No one will be able to take them head on.

So maybe they'll make a run.

Figure once word gets out what she's planning, what she's selling, the bill of goods,
they'll get plenty who'll want to pledge. Young and desperate and feeble and alone,
they'll take in the dregs. And the sly and the lazy who smell a good thing in her money,
and her promise to feed everyone.

Yeah, figure they'll make a run.

Figure they'll run till everyone realizes that a cure is a dream and she's out of her
skull. A run till Predo and Terry start sending in their people to infiltrate and fuck
shit up.

Figure it will end bad.

Like there's any other kind of ending.

Christian takes two more beers from the case and cracks them open and hands one over.

--A war. That's a hell of a thing. Think we'd all be together, what with how much we have
in common.

He blows across the mouth of his bottle.

--You think about it much, Joe?

I tap my Zippo against my bottle.

--What part?

He points at a scabbed gash on the back of my hand.

--What it is. If any of the looneys are right. Like maybe it's not a virus at all. Maybe
it's a chemical. Something the government experimented with and lost control of. Or maybe
they are in control of it, and they're watching us all the time to see how we cope with
it. Or a curse. Not like some Dracula bullshit, but a real curse from a real God. Like in
the Bible. In the Bible, a curse is usually a test. So maybe it's a test. And the ones
that pass it are the ones who don't give in to it. Like the only way to win is to let
yourself die. Or the Enclave and that stuff. What if they're right? Or is it the next step
in evolution or a failed step or is it because somewhere in our past all our grandmoms
took the same medication or we stood too close to an X-ray machine or all screwed the same
monkey. Shit, I don't know.

He makes a fist, loosens it.

--Do you ever think about what we are?

I finish my beer.

--Well, Christian, way I figure it, either you're a Vampyre created by the Vyrus, or you're
a vampire created by a something else. It makes any fucking difference which it is, I
haven't noticed.

He looks down the neck of his bottle, drains it.

--Yeah, guess that's so.

He tosses the bottle into a garbage can against the wall and it shatters.

--But still, I'd like to know someday.

I toss my bottle after his.

--Don't hold your breath.

More beer. More good music. The sun is moving across the sky out there. Things will be
happening soon.

Things are already happening.

He points at the knife-thrower's target.

--Remember that?

I look at the photocopied face of the Arab on the target.

--Sure.

He shakes his head.

--That smell. When they went down. Man, that smell. Blood. Gallons. Everyone went berserk.
Rogues. Clan members. Losers came out of the woodwork and swarmed down there for days.
Man. Looking at the missing-person posters after, I used to wonder how many went in the
towers and how many just got taken off the street. Chaos.

--It was a mess.

He nods.

--But you were righteous. You and Terry. Saw right away it had to be stopped. Went down
there and cracked skulls. Closed it down. All the cops and emergency services, they had
come across a couple of us feeding in that rubble, first thing we would have been rounded
up and thrown in camps. Man.

He laughs.

--Would have been all the proof they needed which side the devil was on. Would have thought
we were flying the planes.

He stops laughing.

--But it was a mess. You came and told me you needed us down there. We rode. But, man, that
was some killing we had to do, wasn't it?

I pick at the edge of my beer label.

--That was some killing.

He looks at me.

--You can't stay here, Joe.

I take a drink.

--I know.

--Hate to have to make it that way.

--I get it.

--Kind of always thought you'd end up down here with us. Just didn't think it'd be after
you shot Lydia and stabbed Bird. We can stand some heat. The local odds and ends down here
below Houston, they cause trouble, we can hold our own against any of them. But a real
Clan? We just don't have the soldiers for it, man.

--Sure.

He points the neck of his beer bottle at the guys goofing in the garage.

--And I'm club president, man. I got a responsibility to the members. I say we're riding
into war, they ride. But there has to be a reason. Has to be some profit. You had joined
up back when I offered, it might be different.

--Sure.

He looks at me.

--A war, man. Bird tells you there's a war coming, I have to take that serious. Sure, man,
we like to crack skulls. We want to ride free and do what the hell we please, but there's
shit I don't need to see again. You, Joe, trying to keep you here, at the Society's back
door, that's gonna raise things to an instant boil. There's a war on the way, I can't stop
it. But I have no percentage in hastening it along. Or asking it in.

I get tired of hearing what I already know and take him off the hook.

--I'm not asking you for anything. Sun goes down, I'm gone.

He lets some air out.

--We'll give you some wheels. Something to wear doesn't smell like shit. That's about all
we got to spare.

--I'll take them.

I stand up.

--Mind if I use the phone?

--All yours. You remember how?

--Yeah.

I limp over to the old pay phone mounted on the wall next to a collage of
Hustler
pinups. I take the handset from the cradle and hit the side of the phone a couple times
until I get a dial tone.

I punch in some numbers.

Tenderhooks takes the tarp off a well-used '75 850cc black Norton Commando.

--Gonna beat your kidneys to hell.

I feel the broken ribs in my back.

--Great.

We get some gas in the tank and dribble a little in the carb and Tenderhooks kicks it a
few times and it coughs black smoke and shudders awake. He revs it up, twisting the gas
with the chrome pincers at the end of his prosthetic arm, and it settles into a nice, even
idle and he lets it run for a minute and kills it.

He wipes some dust from the tank.

--She'll do ya.

--Thanks.

I finish my last beer and tuck the empty bottle in the inside pocket of my leather jacket.
Even after a good sponging and a spray with Lysol it's rank and stained. But Evie gave it
to me, I won't leave it behind.

The only guy big enough to give me some pants is nicknamed Tiny. So it's a given I have to
cinch the belt tight around my waist to keep the jeans from falling down. I opted for one
of Tenderhooks's sweaty thermals. It's snug and smells almost as bad as the jacket. But
someone had some old combat boots my size. So there's that.

Christian comes back with the piece of rubber hose I asked for.

--You don't want a full can? We can stick it in the saddlebags.

I stuff the tube into one of the jacket pockets.

--This is fine.

--Got a couple pieces in the armory, you want one.

--Keep 'em.

Tenderhooks hauls on a chain and it rattles through a pulley and the door rolls up.

I push the bike out to the street and lean it on its stand.

Christian hands me a pair of goggles.

--Hey, man, the Van Helsing. You ever figure that?

I swing a leg over the seat.

--Yeah. That was a bunch of crazy Hebrews out in Brooklyn.

--Brooklyn? No shit?

--Yeah. Way I clock it, Solomon was selling them blood that wasn't kosher. They found out.

--Serious?

--Yeah.

--What was with all the chopping?

--They like to cut people into twelve pieces. It's a thing they do.

He shakes his head.

--Some fucking people, man.

--Yeah.

I kick the bike and trip it into gear and ride.

I ride Pike to Division and veer south into Chinatown. Wall turf. Not that there's much
left of the Wall. At Confucius Place I cut down to Pearl, and from there under the
Brooklyn Bridge to Water and Slip.

The limo is there.

I pull up behind it and wait for a hail of bullets. It doesn't come. I let the bike idle
and climb off and put it up and limp over to the car and a tinted rear window zips down
and Dexter Predo looks at me.

--You look worse for wear, Pitt.

--You look like a rat-faced shit fucker.

He nods.