Midnight Taxi Tango (8 page)

Down the stairs and through the freaky-clean playroom, into the tunnel. Nothing comes. No bugs, no gangly man. Nada.

“Here.” The first word I've spoken in what seems like a long, long time; it's just a hoarse whisper. I wade back into
the dark waters, Glock leveled at the blackness around me. The light at the far end is out, so I have to feel my way along. Behind me, Charo makes barely a sound as he enters the water, the slightest intake of breath and then a tiny splash as the waves circle outward from him.

I have one hand stretched out ahead of me, just over the surface of the water. I feel those body parts rub against my legs as I move forward. I should be near the edge by now, but there's no Angie. A little desperation creeps into my grasping, a whisper of nervousness. She's not here. I make a little splish noise as my hand pats the water. She's not here. I reach down, holding my breath, swipe from side to side. Nothing.

Charo moves past me, gun first. The tunnel opening interests him. I'm considering the possibility that I imagined Angie being there in a fit of desperation when my hand brushes past something that feels like metal. The ring.
Angie.
I wrap around the hand it's attached to and pull; a dark shape breaks the surface.

“Charo,” I whisper. He doesn't answer, so I look up and he's frozen, staring past me down the tunnel where we came from. There's something behind me. It's true in the tiny hairs standing up on the back of my neck and the clenching in my gut, true in my finger as it tenses over the trigger.

“Down.” He says it so quietly. It's a whisper, just for me. If I'd hesitated even a second, I'd be splattered across the tunnel, another body for the collection. Charo's double barrel comes up as I fall face-first into the water. I tuck forward and glimpse behind me as I fall: silhouetted in the dim light of the tunnel, there's another tall robed man, just like the one I blew away. He's there for only a second before Charo unleashes that deafening blast and the man disintegrates into a raging swarm.

For a moment, the water closes over my head. I come up sputtering, still clutching Angie's wrist. Charo's gone. Something's there, a bluster of movement in the darkness. It's
Charo, I realize, but he's covered, every inch of him, covered, in the pale swarm. He's not screaming, but only because he knows what'll happen if he opens his mouth. I belt the gun and retrieve the can of spray, put it directly on my friend, and blast away. It only sort of works. A few flutter away, a few move aside. Mostly they are unperturbed. We have to get out of here.

• • •

Charo's brushing them off with quick, deft slashes of his hands as we grope through the darkness out of the water. In the tunnel, I help him find his face beneath the writhing, squirming creatures. I can see he's doing everything he can not to lose his shit. For a few seconds the only sounds are our hands brushing feverishly against his skin, his clothes, and then his panting, coughing back the urge to scream. Finally he nods at me. There are still a few on him, but we can't stand here anymore, not knowing what's coming from where. I hoist Angie onto my shoulders. She's too heavy, and water and black ichor pour from her flesh. Something falls off, maybe a foot. I ignore it. I have to. We make it up the narrow stairs, back into the brightly lit playroom, so sterile and full of untold horrors. I know the short gangly one is watching us. He's close. I can smell him, feel his eyes all over us. Then we're bumping through the kitchen and once again into the hallway and finally, finally, out into the blessed night. There's a little den above the Medianoche Car Service garage. It smells like air freshener with a hint of mold; a large window looks over the fleet of black Crown Vics to the big iron gate that keeps the world out. This is where they brought Lizette after she was gang-raped. She lay on this couch, staring at the ceiling, barely moving at all, achingly calm, while Charo and I took to the streets for revenge. The couch is draped with old blankets; one of the armrests is falling apart. This is where Santo lay dying after
the Canarsie firefight, Dr. Tijou frowning over him, his arms flailing out like they were trying to grasp at some lifeline that wasn't there.

This is where Charo first told me Angie was gone. I don't come here much ever since that day, but right now I feel peaceful—that calm the world brings after a battle. That calm of finally knowing after all these months.

I'm wearing sweatpants tied tightly around my waist because they're about eight sizes too big. My graying hair is slicked back against my skull and my skin is raw from so much scrubbing. Charo's industrial-strength antibacterial soaps have done their thing and I actually do feel moderately clean, considering. Considering. I shudder, run a hand over my face, and plop onto the couch.

Charo comes in wearing workout shorts and a Yankees T-shirt. It's been decades since I've seen the man wearing anything but his usual button-down shirts and slacks. He stands there looking at me and then takes two Conejos out of his pack, lights them both and hands me one.

It feels like an angel is giving me mouth-to-mouth, that first sweet inhale. A blessing.

“Shelly?”

“Dr. Tijou says she's gonna be okay.” Tijou had been one of Haiti's top trauma surgeons until she treated the wrong minister's estranged nephew and ended up in Brooklyn patching up the survivors of various gangland massacres. She's worked on all of us at one time or another, saved all our lives. Tijou's always smiling and muttering things to herself in Creole and she's smarter than anyone I've ever met. If she says Shelly's gonna be okay, then Shelly's gonna be okay.

“There was something on her back though.” Charo scowls. “An opening.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“Tijou says it seems like they were trying to implant something in her. Eggs, she thinks.”

“Eggs?”

“Like they were using the girls as some kind of incubators. That's what the doc says anyway. I don't know. They're still checking . . . Angie.”

I nod.

“Oh, and she gave me these for you.” He hands me a plastic baggie full of colorful pills.

“Morphine?”

“Retrovirals and antibiotics.”

“Boo.”

“Take them all. I got some too.”

“Alright, alright.” I pocket the baggie.

“I have something to say,” Charo announces. I do too, actually, but I stay quiet. Charo looks uncertain, another first for him. We smoke in silence. When we finish the cigarettes, he retrieves two more.

“Want me to start?” I ask.

“No.”

“Okay.”

He takes a deep breath. “I'm done.” It's what I was gonna say too, and in a way I'm not surprised. We've always walked parallel paths. “In fact, I'm mad that it took this”—a vague gesture toward the hell we've just been through—“to get me to this place. But no, I can't . . . We can't keep doing this. It's”—a deep tug on the Conejo, a mountainous release—“not right. It's wrong.”

I nod. Tonight is full of surprises.

“It's been coming ever since Angie went missing,” Charo says. “I've seen it in you too. We can't . . . We have to stop.” He's staring out the window at the pipe-lined rafters over the garage.

“You want to disband the whole operation?”

“No.”

“Oh?”

“A change of direction, is all.” He shrugs, looks at me, and
suddenly he's the old Charo again. A mischievous glint dances in his eyes. “This work has connected me to a lot of very powerful, very evil people. Even more evil than us, I mean. People with genocide and child rape on their résumés. These are men who can nod and wipe out an entire village in Guatemala.”

He's not just talking about other gangsters either. I'd steered clear of the corporate connections Charo sent the girls to, mostly because I had the feeling I might lose my cool with them and cause problems for the company, but I've heard stories.

“So you want to start a cleanup operation,” I say carefully.

Charo smiles. He likes that. “Yes. Cleanup. Exactly. A balancing of the scales, we could say.” The smile grows wider, stretches to the far ends of his face; his eyes become squinty above those great big dimples. “Justice.”

Charo can call it what he wants. I'm calling it revenge. “I'm in,” I say. “But there's somewhere I want to start.”

Charo nods. “I know.”

Out the window, the iron gate shudders and rises with a groan. We stand there side by side and finish our cigarettes as morning pours into the garage.

BURN THE WHOLE SHIT DOWN

Fue mia la piadosa dulzura de sus manos,

que dieron a mis penas caricias de bondad,

y ahora que la evoco hundido en mi quebranto,

las lagrimas pensadas se niegan a brotar,

y no tengo el consuelo de poder llorar . . .

The sweet compassion of her hands: it was mine;

their caresses soothed my agony,

and now that I evoke her, drowned in all I've lost,

the tears I once imagined refuse to flow,

and I'm without even the consolation of being able to cry.

“Sus ojos se cerraron”
tango, 1935

Alfredo Le
Pera

Carlos

H
ave you ever mourned?”

I looked up, met Sasha's deep stare. It was four a.m. and snowing—the worst night of my short, twisted life, the best night of my short, twisted life. My partner Dro's screams still echoed through me; I could still see him fade into the oblivion of the Deeper Death as a swarm of tiny demons overcame him. Riley was in a coma; I'd barely made it out alive. And here I was, looking into the eyes of this woman, wrapped in the embrace of her apartment. She sat with one knee tucked up against her chest and her bare shoulders glinting in the dim lamplight. Her brown skin was tinged ever so slightly with gray, and her lips pouted just so as she stared at me, eyebrows creased.

“Have I mourned who?”

We hardly knew anything about each other, but we knew the one thing that made us different from everyone else. When we met a few nights before at a yuppie bar in Park Slope, we'd silently agreed to refrain from reading each other's wandering spiritual information. We didn't ask—we just didn't go there at all. It was understood.

So when she frowned and said, “You, man,” it caught me off guard.

Snow pirouetted wildly through the glow of streetlamps. The heater clattered an arrhythmic dirge and then sighed.

Sasha didn't rush me. The winter night felt infinite. Her stare didn't demand answers, and when I met it again I felt a deep sadness open up inside of me. It was perfect and alone—a single long note from a trumpet.

“No.”

One corner of her mouth curved upward, just slightly. “Maybe you should.”

I nodded. “Did you?”

“Trevor and I did a ceremony about a year after it happened.”

Trevor—her brother and only friend. Trevor, who I murdered on orders from the Council. I closed my eyes and sucked it all back in. There would be a moment to explain all that, I told myself, and this wasn't it.

“He wasn't really trying to do all that, of course.” Her scoff held no humor. “But I convinced him. He was so sad and sulky all the time—at first, I mean. We both were. He knew he needed something to change.

“I went to a vivero—one of those live poultry spots on Classon, you know? Got two pigeons. They put 'em in whatever ol' box they have lying around, this busted Nike box, right?” She's smiling now, and her eyes shine with oncoming tears. “Went to the bridge one warm night in October. The Manhattan Bridge. It was late, maybe two a.m., and we walked right to the middle of the bridge with this shoe-box birdcage and then we both said a little something, a prayer I guess, and then we let them go. They flapped up into the crossbeams and then out into the night.”

“And that was it? Who did you pray to?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. The universe? God, I guess? I don't have a name for it. Don't need one really.”

I nodded. I knew exactly what she meant.

“And then?”

“And then I went on with my life, or whatever this is.”

“You felt better?”

Sasha put on her mean face: eyes slit, both brows raised, neck craned toward me. “No, Carlos, I felt like shit. Yes, I felt better. But it's not just about feeling better. It's about letting go. Sometimes you have to do something, you know, something real, to wake yourself up.”

I hadn't known I was asleep, but then, maybe I had.

A bunch of dumb comebacks tried to surface and I discarded them all.

She was right.

In a few hours we'd be making passionate love while the morning broke. In another day, she'd figure out what I'd done and impale me with my own sword. A few months after that, we would save each other's lives amid the near destruction of the natural order of life and death and then say good-bye once and for all.

But in this moment, I watched her fuss with her hair and I thought about everything she'd just said and everything she was, what I was and how I got there. And I batted away all nagging demons of the future and past and smiled at her with my whole face.

“Carlos!”

That's Riley's voice.

“Wake the fuck up, bro.”

But Riley's in a coma.

“Yo, C!”

Riley stands over me, arms crossed over his broad chest, one eyebrow raised. Lips pursed. This is Riley's unimpressed face. A crew of soulcatchers lingers behind him, their face guards lifted; I recognize a few of them from the park earlier: Squad 9.

A thick, surly ghost steps beside him. Sylvia Bell. The horrible night comes back in jolted shivers.

“He okay?” Sylvia asks.

Riley shakes his head. “I guess.”

I'm in my apartment. The windows are open, letting in a cool early-morning breeze. Outside the sky lightens toward dawn. A tiny shimmering phantom bursts through the air, wrapping his hands around a slender brown neck. I jolt up. “Kia!”

Riley's barely there palm against my chest sends me sprawling back onto the couch. “Easy, C. She's alright. Sleeping it off in your bed. But we gotta talk.” He looks at Sylvia. “Give us the room, Syl.”

Syl?

She nods at her team and they disperse, mingling with the shadows and then vanishing completely. Riley looks back at me, shakes his head again. “Get up. Make coffee, whatever, but listen carefully to what I'm saying to you.”

I stand, find my balance, shuffle into the kitchen. Nothing seems too damaged, just a general crappiness that resounds across my body. I fuss with the cafetera. Riley leans over the kitchen counter and gets up in my face.

“Are you listening?”

“Mothafucka, you ain't speaking. Speak and I'll listen. But get out my face.”

For a second we just stare at each other. Then Riley says, “You fucked up.”

I curl my upper lip into a snarl and squint at him. I don't know what he's talking about. Hell, maybe he's right, but it's what you do when someone throws down like that. It's protocol.

“Think I'm kidding?” Riley says.

“I think you should just tell me what you're talking 'bout rather than going comandante on my ass.”

“Kia,” Riley says. He doesn't waver in his glare. Doesn't flinch.

I run it back in my mind. The child ghost, the park around us, the newspapers fluttering in the streetlights. Kia, her
eyes wide. She hadn't seen the dead before last night, I realize. All her dealings with spiritual folks at the botánica and she'd never actually seen a spirit herself. But in that moment, her eyes fixated right on the ghostling. And then the ghostling turned to me.

“You understand what I'm talkin' 'bout yet, C?” Riley has stepped back. I'm standing there still holding the half-full metal basin for the cafetera, and Riley just stares at me.

“I hesitated.”

He nods. “Why?”

“I . . .”

“Stop,” Riley says. “Think about it before you answer.”

The face. It was just a child. I mean, you could tell from the back it was a child ghost, but then he turned and that young face was still pudgy with baby fat but contorted with rage, eyes sunk deep in his skull, mouth stretched wide, teeth long and sharp.

“Why'd you pause, C?”

But past the demon there was still something in there, a glimmer of what that kid had once been, some flicker of life. He'd turned to me, and in that millisecond I'd seen through the mask of rage and into its core. “Because I saw past the demon.”

“Wrong.”

“What?”

“You're missing something, man. Go deeper.” The instinct to push back rises again, but Riley cuts me off before I can start. “You've sliced demon kids before. I seen you do it. No one likes to. It's never easy, but we do what we have to do, right? We always do what we have to do.”

I nod. The worst was two years back: a toddler who had burned up in a tenement fire started plaguing the ER waiting room at Woodhull. Asphyxiated an old man and was about to possess one of the security guards when Riley and I caught up to him and put him away. The shit doesn't usually bother me, but I didn't sleep for a week after that night.

“And your friend was in danger last night, C. You had every reason and cause to move with unfettered ruthlessness. To be that unhesitating bad mothafucka that I personally know you to be in a time of crisis.”

“But I paused.”

“Why?”

“Riley.” Sylvia Bell appears in the doorway. “He's up.”

I hear the cafetera clatter into the sink. “He . . . the ghostling? He's
here
?”

Riley squints at me. “This conversation isn't over, Carlos.”

“You brought him
here?
”

Sylvia vanishes into the hallway. Riley shoots me a final, penetrating glare and then heads after her. “We locked him in your bathroom. Come have a look.”

• • •

The Council has an official policy against hiring child ghosts. It sounds good on paper, but the result is a bunch of young souls loitering around the living world. Most of them end up running dumb errands in exchange for toys or candy, and when the Council's dumbass telepathy shit breaks down, they head right to one of those deserted alleyways full of little floating ghosticles with a handful of mints.

So there you have it.

Every once in a while one goes malignant. I've never gotten anyone to explain how this happens. Pent-up bitterness, some unresolved shit from their life, the infinite angst of being dead and aimless among the living. Everyone's got theories. However it happens, it's a terror to behold. They tend to lash out in random bursts, exploding through a room like tiny translucent Tasmanian devils and leave it a disaster area in seconds. And then they'll vanish, sometimes for days, and pop up again a whole borough over, kill or maim a bunch of folks real quick again, with no apparent pattern or logic, and be gone. It's rare, thankfully, but when it happens, it
means they gotta get got quick. That's the rule. See one, take it out.

And yes, it's fucked up, slicing a tiny shiny ghost, even when you know you're sparing the world from an endless series of massacres. Doesn't matter. We're hardwired to protect anything small and helpless-looking, even if you walk up on it strangling a little old lady.

Or your good friend.

I shudder, soft-stepping down the hall behind Riley's shimmering glow. I know he's right and I still don't know how to answer the question, which makes me want to kick his ass. A dull thud comes from behind the closed bathroom door, followed a few seconds later by a scratching noise. Riley smiles back at me, and I flip him off. The thud happens again, then more scratching.

“You put down one of those oogy-boogy ghost boundary things y'all love using?” I whisper.

Sylvia nods. “He's not going anywhere.”

We stand in a semicircle facing my bathroom door. The thing thuds again, scratches. “Tell me again why y'all subdued this thing and brought it here for a sleepover instead of taking him out like we supposed to?” Sylvia opens her mouth, but I cut her off. “Because I seem to recall about five seconds ago having my ass handed to me for not dispatching him myself.”

Riley shakes his head. “That was different. You hesitated and got jumped. We captured him. Tell him, Syl.”

“He's not acting right,” she says.

“No shit. He's been killing people in the park for a week.”

“One.” Sylvia raises a finger. “He's stayed within a set four-block radius. Two.” And another. “The attacks have happened one at a time and usually with twenty-four hours between them. And three, he followed Kia.”

Thud.

“What?”

Scratch-scratch-scratch.

“Yep,” Riley says. “After your milquetoast-ass save-the-day fail, Kia ran and the ghostling went after her. Followed her halfway up Marcy, and then she dropkicked the thing. Then Syl snatched him out the sky and we bagged it.”

“Shit. So he's . . .”

“Not just some random angry child spirit gone bad,” Sylvia finishes.

I look back and forth between them. “The fuck is it, then?”

Riley shakes his head. “I hate to say this, but it seems like he's been weaponized.”

Thud.

“Weaponized?”

Scratch-scratch-scratch.

“Like someone caught a child ghost, broke him, made him their own personal killing slave, basically, and then released him into the world.”

“And who was he trying to—” I start to say, but I don't have to finish. Riley's staring at the bedroom door. And he already said the ghostling chased her. “No. Why would anyone—no.”

Sylvia nods.

“She did used to hang out at that park every day,” I whisper. “And then she stopped for a while, over some boy, I think. So you think”—
thud
—“the thing was operating on old intelligence, and when she wasn't where she was sposta be, he just started killing folks randomly, waiting for her to get back?”

Scratch-scratch.

“Man.” Riley shakes his head. “Something like that. I know it's not a perfect theory, but what else we got to go on? I never seen a wild ghostling act like that. I never seen anything act like that.”

“So you brought the demon-child assassin to my house and locked him into the bathroom across from the girl he's trying to kill?” My whisper is more like a strained cough.

“The fuck else was I sposta do with him, man? This the only way we gonna find out what the fuck is going on. And
anyway, I'm not really interested in your opinion at this moment. Consider your decision-making skills in question. Feel me, Dr. Hesitation?”

“
My
decision-making . . .
My?
”

“Listen, boys,” Sylvia says, inserting her formidable bulk between us. “You gotta relax. This isn't going to . . .”

The bedroom door opens, and we all whip around to see Kia staring wide-eyed from the darkness. “What . . . the . . . fuck?” she gasps.