Midnight Taxi Tango (19 page)

“You don't want my help keeping you safe, do you?” I say.

Caitlin shakes her head. “I want you to help me find my brother and fucking kill that piece of shit, Carlos.”

Very slowly, I nod. “I can do that.”

“Great. Eleven p.m., here.” She puts a scrap of paper on the bar. The Bushwick address we followed the ghostling to is scrawled on it in neat handwriting. “Bring your sword.”

And she's gone.

• • •

Twenty minutes later I'm alone and on my third rum and Coke, putting all the pieces together, when I feel the prickly awareness of a small presence by my side. I turn and then stumble backward, groping for my blade. The . . . the thing . . . The killer child ghost sits on the barstool next to mine. He's staring at me, expression calm, if not a little lopsided.

“The fuck . . .” I stammer, reaching for my blade.

“Easy, Carlos.” It's Riley, his shimmery ass chuckling as he long-steps across Burgundy Bar with his hands up. “It's cool, man.”

I resheathe but don't sit back down. The ghostling just stares at me. “You . . . It's . . . What the fuck?”

“It's uh . . . reformed? Whatever, it's okay now.” Riley sits on the other side of the ghostling, and I warily take my own seat and signal Quiñones to bring two drinks.

“How, man?”

Quiñones is used to creepy motherfuckers like myself
ordering more drinks than necessary and carrying on whole conversations with folks that ain't there. If anything, he was probably more surprised to see me walk in with an actual person earlier.

“Sylvia figured it out,” Riley says. “Said she used to teach private school when she was alive and so reforming the homicidal deep programming of some wee errant soul was no big deal. I think she got some secret powers she's not telling me 'bout though, to be honest.”

“If I told you, they wouldn't be secret.” Sylvia Bell takes the stool beside Riley and nods at me. I signal Quiñones for another drink as he puts the first two down, and he growls. The Burgundy is filling back up. I recognize most of Sylvia's crew from Squad 9 taking up an entire corner. They're carrying on about some inside joke, glancing at us every now and then to make sure everything's alright.

The child ghost hasn't stopped staring at me. “Is he . . . Is he okay though?”

“We don't really know,” Sylvia says. “Probably not, considering all he's been through. But he's not trying to murder everybody, so that's a step in the right direction.”

“Word,” I say, and clink my glass against Riley's and Sylvia's. We drink, the two ghosts leaning forward to sip so as not to freak out Quiñones any more than necessary.

“What's the play, C? I heard you were in here having an interesting conversation.”

I shake my head. “To say the least. I mean, it was boring as fuck for ninety percent of the time, but yeah, I think I found out what I needed to.”

“Listen,” Sylvia says. “If Caitlin is the one behind this situation.” She throws a curt nod at the child ghost. “She has to die. I'll do it. I don't give a fuck. But she has to die.”

“She is,” I say. “And believe me—there's already a long line for that job. Took all I had not to end her right quick
just now, but not yet. She wants me to help her make a move on her brother—thinks he's the one that took out their parents the other night.”

“He's not though, is he?” Riley asks.

I shake my head.

“Got it.”

“Reza and Kia are trying to bring in the Survivors to help us too.”

“The Survivors as in the group outlawed by the Council?” Sylvia says.

Riley and I both nod and then stare at her.

“I'm in,” Sylvia says. “Council's out here trying to protect the complete failure of a human being that tortured these children into being murderers—they're dead to me.”

“No pun,” Riley says.

“Shut up, Riley,” Sylvia says.

I like her.

• • •

“So I said to Botus, ‘No, mothafucka, you're gonna pick up the dog.'” It's two hours later and I'm standing in the far corner of the Burgundy Bar, surrounded by the shimmering shrouds and laughing faces of Squad 9. We're all utterly wrecked.

“You ain't really call Botus a mothafucka, C,” Riley says.

“I'm paraphrasing, mothafucka.” More riotous laughter.

“I did actually call Bart Arsten a dickhole one time,” Sylvia says. She's less outwardly sloppy than Riley or me, but her eyes are narrowed and teary.

“Get the fuck outta here,” Gordon scoffs. He's the tallest Squad 9 'catcher, and the loudest.

Sylvia glares at him for a solid four seconds, just long enough to quiet the room. Then she blurts out a laugh. “I really did though.” Everyone relaxes and chuckles. “It was
right after I got out of the academy. He wanted to send me on some runaround to get back this ghost of a teacher I knew.”

Angry, incredulous noises from the crowd. Sylvia shakes her head. “Like . . . I knew this man. I worked with him. Arthur, his name was. We were friends even, in that easy sort of not-too-deep way you have with coworkers. Taught eighth-grade earth science. He, you know, he made sense, in a way that most teachers at that ragged fuckhole of a school didn't. He was kind. Got hit by a car the night before his wedding.”

The whole bar's quiet now. Quiñones wipes down the counter, muttering to himself. We all shake our heads, taking in Sylvia's story.

“Took him a day or two to actually die, so the shit wasn't sudden, didn't wipe out his memory. No offense, Riley.” Riley shakes his head. “So
of course
the guy's gonna come back over. If nothing else to try and comfort his mourning fiancée or whatever. Shit. And Bartholomew McFuckshit wants me, still fairly recently dead myself—heart attack, by the way,” she adds. “Anyway, this piece of shit wants me to go drag him back down to Hell? Two days after he was supposed to get married? Um, no.”

“You didn't go?” Andrea asks. She's long and thin, and from what I hear, the fiercest of the new batch of fresh-out-the-academy 'catchers.

“Oh, I went,” Sylvia says. “And I stood beside him the whole time while he did what he had to do, said his good-byes, handled his business. Then I let him know what was what with the Council, how to stay under the radar, whatever, and sent him on his way.”

Squad 9 lets out a cheer for their commander. Riley slides into the seat next to Sylvia and throws an arm around her. “Proud of you, babe,” he says, smiling drunkenly into her shoulder.

Babe?
I'm too drunk to think too hard about it. All I know is, it's an overcast afternoon and I've just met with the woman that wants to kill most of my favorite people in the world and now I'm surrounded by outrageous, happy souls that I barely know but somehow love.

Kia

A
t the botánica, NY1 blares news about the Ferns' house blowing up. A reporter with a young face and receding hairline explains that no bodies were found and the elder Ferns are still unaccounted for. He sounds genuinely upset about it, and then it's time for Traffic on the Ones. I mute the TV—you have to stand up and turn the remote at some hypotenuse-ass angle while pressing the button eighteen million times to get it to work—and then slump back into my swively stool and cross my arms over my chest.

I'm sick of this, all this. Sick of feeling the icy sensation that some dead eyes linger on the back of my neck, sick of flinching at every passing shadow, glancing at corners to see if some skittering, six-legged pale agent of death is there, sick of checking the skin on strangers' faces in case it tries to crawl away. Sick of ghosts and guns. Sick of death. Sick of myself. Sick of being sick of shit. After the standoff in the park, I headed to Carlos's, tacked a note on his door about meeting Sasha, and then came here, tired and irritable and over it all.

I put on my headphones, which I never do when I'm behind the counter, and at first, even King Impervious's words feel faraway and useless. It's one of her slow joints—slow by
Impervious standards anyway—and she got some dude that sounds like he's a day away from dying of throat cancer to sing the hook. Yes,
I am the riot son / the king of chaos come,
and in the back a chorus of sexy girls—you can tell they sexy; it's not a debate—chants,
I am the riot, the riot, the mothafuckin' riot,
and then the King comes in, spittin' machine-gun thunder:
Come chaos, come from the barrel of the gun / Fuck the path fuck the way fuck the method fuck the sun.
She just said “fuck the sun.” I know it's coming; I still smile every time.
Find me in the fire line / Floatin' like a satellite / Fucking mothafuckas in the face with a Cadillac.
Like . . . How does one go about fucking a mothafucka in the face with a Cadillac? I don't care. She doesn't care. We don't care together. Anyone who cares can fuck off.

I'm just letting a smile cross my face when the door chimes erupt through my music, through my skull, and a group of white boys rumble into the store. I pause the King, take off my headphones. They pass without a glance in my direction.

“No, Kenny, no, it's over here!”

“Shut up, Bill!”

“And so I told her, ‘No, girl, it's not even like that!' She just shook her head. I'm so fucking tired of her shit, man.”

“Yeah, man. Yeah.”

“It's over here! Kenny, come here.”

“I'm coming, man, relax.”

“Bill, you gotta shut up, man.”

I can't keep track of who's Bill or Kenny or getting curved by whose girlfriend, and really, I don't care. I just want them out. The air fills with them—their banter and boy smell and whiteness, their exaggerated ease with one another and the world.

“Ahahahaha, these are potions though! Like, for real, this soap is supposed to scare away ghosts.”

“Oh shit, man.”

“Kenny, what's this mean, a love potion?”

“Yeah, that's supposed to bring the ladies right to you, man.”

“Let's get it for Bill. Maybe Christine will stop friend zoning his ass.”

Wild laughter. Because really, what's funnier than other people's cultures and sexual coercion?

“No, no, this one, this one: brings in the money!”

“Woo-woo!”

“We can pay rent this month! Get three!”

More laughter. My right hand has found its way to the short blade Carlos gifted me; my fingers wrap tight around the handle. I wonder briefly if my body has figured out something my mind doesn't know yet. But no floating translucent weirdoes clutter the air, and no child demons emerge from the shadows. It's not fear, this need to hold something lethal. It's rage.

The boys drop eight packets of Baba Eddie's soaps and herbal remedies on the counter. One of them, Bill, I guess, says: “We'll take 'em all.” And for the first time, in their world, I exist. A transaction is needed; my presence matters now.

“No,” I say.

I'm not sure what it is. White people have been coming in more and more these days. Sometimes they're respectful, sometimes not, but I've never felt like this. When I say
no,
really it means
fuck you
, and I relish the sizzling denial lingering in the silence that follows.

“Uh . . .” Bill says. Then they all laugh, but it's forced. Surely I must be joking.

Really, the dried herbs and soaps, on their own, are a quick fix. Baba always tells people that himself. It's like getting some generic over-the-counter shit when you could go get
diagnosed and prescribed a true, tailor-made remedy just for you. But they're also cheap, and folks are struggling.

Anyway, the product's not the point: I'm fed up.

“What do you mean, no?” Bill says into my icy glare.

“I mean, you can't buy them.”

The chuckles stop.

“Why not?”

“Because”—I dig up a smile—“I said so.”

Suddenly, I can taste violence in the air. It must be their sweaty fight-or-flight glands going into collective overdrive. An unexpected ripple has been torn in their meticulously cultivated ghetto paradise, and I'm the mothafuckin' pebble. I feel like King Impervious would be proud.

I smile wider.

“Wha—?” another stutters. “We want to see your manager.”

“Kenny,” Bill says, lip curled into a sneer. “Forget it. She's just a stupid kid.”

“No, that's not the point, man! Where's your manager?”

“You're looking at her.” I'm not just a pebble. I'm a stone. A rock. Their whirlwinding frustration curls and crashes around me. “How may I help you?”

“Fuck this,” a third says. “Where's this Baba Eddie guy, then? We want to file a complaint. Because this is some bullshit, seriously.”

I take a piece of paper from the printer and poise a pen above it. “I'll take your complaint. What seems to be the trouble today, sir?”

They erupt into a fury of protest. The air thickens. Their wiry bodies tense; that flailing gets erratic. If a hand crosses the counter at me, I'll take it off.

“This is
so
unacceptable!”

“Yeah, Christine?” one of them says into a super-expensive-looking cell phone. “You won't believe this shit!
We're at the store around the corner where they sell the voodoo stuff and . . . What's that? Oh wow, that's cool, yeah.”

I probably wouldn't really chop a hand off. I don't need to go to jail right now. Baba Eddie would have to handle the fallout, and it'd be a whole thing:
Satanic Black Girl Lashes Out
. Whatever. But now this game is getting old and I want to go back to King Impervious. And I have no idea how to get these assholes to leave. What if they decide to occupy the place, and then I'll have to explain everything to Baba Eddie?

The door chimes jangle again, and Baba Eddie walks in with his boyfriend, Russell. Russell's Native, Ojibwa, I think, but folks always confuse him for regular ol' white. He's wearing a slick business suit as always and looking vexed as fuck, as always. For a few seconds, nobody says anything. One of Baba Eddie's eyebrows goes up. Russell furrows his brow, then says, “These boys bothering you, Kia?”

“Wait a minute!” one of them yells.

“She was the one . . .” another starts. But then they all get quiet, cuz Russell raises his hand. He's wide. Not fat. It's just a long way from one side of his shoulders to the other. You could fit three of these scrawny hipsters across Russell's large frame. “I didn't ask you a question, son,” he says real quiet-like. “Now, Kia. Are these . . . boys . . . bothering you?” He squeezes each word out like it hurts.

“Yeah,” I say. “They're being assholes.”

Russell turns to them, frown deepening. The boys look at each other and then scatter. They have to go past Russell and Baba Eddie to get to the door, so there's a lot of simpering “Pardon Me”s and “Sorry”ing and then they're gone and the jangly door slams shut, and Baba Eddie and Russell lean against the counter and glare at me.

“They
were
being assholes,” I say.

“You didn't provoke them at all?” Baba Eddie asks. “Not that I think you would, but . . .”

“They were making fun of your herb packets.” I sound like a petulant little kid, and I don't care. The fire still rages through my insides. “And being disrespectful. And loud.”

Baba Eddie sighs. “Then I'm glad you held it down.”

“She's still mad,” Russell says. I'm annoyed that he's talking about me like I'm not there and even more annoyed that he's right.

“What's wrong, Kia?” Baba Eddie asks, coming around to where I'm sitting. He's pretty small, looks even tinier next to his wide-shouldered boyfriend, and he has to pull up one of the stools to really be comfortable at the counter. “Tell Baba Eddie all about it.”

I shake my head and stupid tears start to form in my stupid eyes like I'm a stupid . . . well, teenager. I just faced down a throng of unruly hipsters without flinching. There's no reason I should suddenly become a whimpering douche bag.

Alas, here I am.

Russell passes me a silk handkerchief, and I wipe my eyes with it and then shake my head again and then just put my head down on Baba Eddie's shoulder and sob silently for a few minutes while he rubs my back.

“I'm fucking angry,” I finally say.

“At who or what?” Baba Eddie asks.

“I can't”—
sniffle
—“talk about it.”

“This have anything to do with whatever fuckshit Carlos been on? Because you sound an awful lot like him right now.”

I manage a choky little laugh. “Only kinda. I don't even really know what I'm mad about. I mean . . . I got everything I wanted. You ever . . . you ever get exactly what you wanted and then realize that you're still mad for not having had it all that time and it just doesn't seem fair at all?”

Both Baba Eddie and Russell nod, faces glum.

“That's me. I just . . . Why didn't he ever tell me? Why didn't he reach out? Anything? I just want to be happy, but
I'm so, so mad. All this time. I feel like a terrible person. I am a terrible person.”

“Ah, Kia.” Baba Eddie shakes his head. “You're all right. I don't know what you did or didn't do, but your feelings don't make you terrible.”

Russell snorts. “That's not what you said last night when I—”

“Quiet, old man,” Baba snaps. “We're going out to dinner—Russell made partner today, and we have some celebrating to do.”

I blink away tears. “Congrats, man!”

Russell shrugs. “Thanks. I plan to rain even more havoc upon the motherfuckers.”

“Excellent,” I say, and hock some boogers into his handkerchief. “I would come, but I gotta meet someone. That situation I was just talking about, as a matter of fact.”

“I'm sure,” Baba Eddie says, “that if you tell the person why you're mad, they'll understand, even if it feels like it doesn't make sense.”

I punch his shoulder. “When did you get so touchy-feely, man? I can't deal with this shit.”

“Pay him no mind,” Russell says, walking to the back. “He'll be back to his old fuckery soon as you dry your tears. I'm gonna go take a piss.”

“You alright?” Baba asks.

“I will be. I'll say what I have to say. And then we'll do what has to be done.”

“That sounds ominous. I'm not sure how I feel about you and Carlos teaming up. I love Carlos like the weird half-dead son I never particularly wanted, but he runs in a dangerous world, Kia.”

“I've noticed.” I want to tell Baba the whole story, from the night Jeremy disappeared on, but he has dinner to go to and I'm not gonna sully Russell's big night. “I'll be careful,” I say. “I promise.”

• • •

Last time I came to the walkway along the Brooklyn waterfront, it was a pretty but haphazard boardwalk, starting and stopping, the fresh ocean air blending with the exhaust and clutter of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. There were lovers and rats and parts where you probably shouldn't go at night and parts that looked like postcards. I was with my dad. We had slipped off from some summer-fun program where the facilitators spoke in all caps with too many exclamation points until my dad finally shook his head and muttered, “Let's get out of here, kid,” and we did. Wandered all through downtown Brooklyn, my little hand in his and white men in business suits and old brown men selling children's books and teenagers popping gum. We stood on the boardwalk, the bay sparkling beneath the midday sun, and a few feet away, a white woman with bags under her eyes got high. Across the bay, Manhattan's steel towers glared back at us, reflected the perfect sky.

Now the waterfront is brand-new. Every plank and screw has been plotted, planned, oh so carefully placed. Nothing is left to chance; nothing deteriorates or scuffs. There's a carousel and playing fields and the walkway stretches all along the edge of the water, rising and falling around little wooded areas. Gio and Rigo walk hand in hand beside me, a picture, essentially, of perfection. Rigo wears a long leather jacket over a light hoodie and a silver button-down shirt—tacky as hell, but . . . he's Rigo. He can literally do whatever the fuck he wants and still look like a god. The top bunch of buttons are open, and he's practically got cleavage, those pecs are so flawlessly defined. I think he has more cleavage than me, dammit.

And Gio's just Gio. Still struts with that unceasing flow, even after all the . . . whatever it is he's been through. He's
in cargo pants, a T-shirt, and that green European-looking overcoat he wears, probably where he keeps all his cool weapons.