Cuts Through Bone (27 page)

“Fucking let go!” he shouted. He caught her ponytail and started yanking. She growled curses, dug her feet into the floor, and bit harder. He slammed her against the counter. Dishes showered onto the floor from the sink drainboard. Glass crunched beneath them. Punches flailed.

“Stop! I'm bleeding, damn it!” Miguel shouted. “I quit!” He let go of her and held up his hands like a beaten criminal. She let go and jumped back, spitting out the taste of his shirt. They were both breathing fast and wearing spots and streaks of blood like Christmas trees flaunt tinsel.

“Damn! You're crazy,” Miguel panted. The kitchen was a mess around them. The table blocked the doorway to the living room.

“You ain't gonna fuck with me no more, Miguel. You or Indio. You should've known that when I wouldn't listen to Papì. I'm done with that shit.”

“Look at you—you look like an animal or something.”

“Me?” She shook her head. “You're still bleeding. Go to the bathroom.” He pulled the table out of the doorway, then pulled off his shirt as he walked. He craned his neck to examine the bite mark on his shoulder. Blood oozed from an egg-size mark. He swore softly. Vasquez pressed clean rags to his scalp in the bathroom and stopped the bleeding from the shallow cuts. He held a pad of gauze to his shoulder.

A few times while they cleaned up, they started to say something, but only shook fingers or snorted instead. They didn't want to start fighting again. She went back out to straighten the mess in the kitchen. After he changed, he came back to sit at the table and watch her. She poured him a cup of coffee to drink while she finished. They watched each other, piecing together what they wanted to say. After the kitchen was reassembled, Vasquez sat down again.

“You ain't never done anything like that before,” Miguel said finally.

“I ain't never been this serious.”

They sat at the table and stared at each other over their cups of coffee. The apartment seemed too quiet. The traffic was distant and faint. Outside the windows, darkness suggested the city was gone, and they were all alone.

“You know I'd do anything for you, right?” Miguel asked. “But what you're doing is crazy. You can't be doing stuff that brings shit down on Mamì.”

“What're you saying? I'm not supposed to do this because I'm a girl? If I was another brother, I could be a criminal and you wouldn't say nothing.”

“I wouldn't tell a man not to be a man,” Miguel said. “But you're my sister. There ain't but one of you. Me and Indio were finished from the beginning. We always knew it didn't matter. You're the one gonna go somewhere for us.”

“You're wrong,” she said softly. Her brothers had always picked on her about school, joking that she had an alien brain. She called them stupid, even after she discovered they knew answers they pretended they didn't. They failed classes because they cut and clowned, not because they couldn't do it. They were loco. More firmly, she continued: “You're wrong, Miguel. You could've done whatever you wanted. You don't get to make me do something by pretending you can't. I get to do what I want, too. I like this job.”

“You want to run out and get yourself killed. We ain't got no other sisters.”

“That's what makes it okay for you and Indio? Mamì would still have Roberto? You want me to be like Roberto? He's full of shit.”

“Okay, nobody likes Roberto! He's an ass, but you don't got to be like him that way. You know I'm talking about the big-time desk job, the suburbs—and get away from this.”

He gestured, a casual flip of the hand that could've meant the kitchen and its faded wallpaper, Henry Street's long row of tenements, or the entire city.

“That's what you want,” she said. “Or maybe what Papì wants. I been doing that my whole life—what somebody else wants. Maybe I don't know for sure what I want, but I know I want to figure it out for myself. You want a desk job? You're smart enough. Do it.”

“
Chica
, you're smart, but you're blind. Look at you. Nobody's ever gonna tell you ‘no.' One look at you and they're trying to figure out how to say ‘yes.' Me? I ain't gonna make it through like that.”

Vasquez frowned. “You think I'm gonna get somewhere on my looks?
Guthrie
don't give a shit about that. I don't know yet what he started with. That's different. That's a place to start.”

Miguel smiled. “When that old man came to the door with that job, you know what I thought? At least this
blanco
gets her off the Lower East.”

“What the fuck?”

“See, you can't see it, because you are who you are. Me and Indio figured it out a long time ago. You don't get the looks we get. Doors swing open for you instead of slamming shut. That's how the world works. We're
morenos
, nobody wants us. You're
la blanquita.
Maybe in the city you're just another Puerto Rican girl, but if you stopped with the hat on the side of your head, you could be one of them.”

“That's what you want? You want me to go away?” Tears slipped from her eyes, even though crying wasn't a thing she usually did.

“No, you don't understand. I want you to have something. You just ain't gonna ever have anything here.”

“But I got something already,” she said softly, even though she understood what he meant. The same complaint had floated around her for years, from anyone who didn't think they had a fair chance. He couldn't see it from her angle, though. She had looked through some of the doors that closed in his face, to see the same world on the other side, only with different people. Listening to Miguel let her see it again. Roberto was unhappy because he was tricked into thinking a difference existed between the two worlds. All his life was filled with promises of how good everything would be, and then everything was the same after all. Discovering the truth without being able to go back made Roberto sick.

“What you got?” Miguel demanded. “Some bullshit job in the city gonna get you killed? That ain't good enough.”

“I got a fucking family—a fucked-up family—but a family,” she said. “I got a job that could go somewhere. You can't see that because you're not there. Right now that's good enough.”

“That ain't good enough. We ain't done all this so you can stay in the city and be stuck in the same mess everybody else is in. You gotta go free.”

“You done what?” Vasquez demanded. “Run around banging? That was for me? Beat up every boy ever looked at me? That was to make me happy? I did good in school because I didn't have anything else to do. You and Indio are
loco
. Now you don't want me doing this? I should be doing girl things? You took that away from me!”

“That fucking trash ain't good enough for you!” Miguel snarled. “Some piece of shit in this neighborhood, not wanting no job, lining up another baby-momma just as soon as you show blue—we'll kill all of them!”

Vasquez sat quietly for a minute, swallowing her anger. She made another cup of coffee for herself. When she sat back down, she said, “You're saying
you
ain't good enough for me, Miguel.
You
bang. That's stupid. But you been doing that forever. When did you get the idea to do that?”

He scowled. “
You're
stupid. I don't handle
chicas
that way. Papì would kill me. What you don't know is when you were little, you were white. You didn't even get
that
dark until we went back to the island a few times. People thought Mamì was sitting you for somebody else. You never saw how people treated you.”

“How the fuck old were you? Or was it Indio? He did this?”

Miguel shrugged. “You can't blame Indio. I hit him first, then Indio kicked him.” He laughed. “That was easier than falling down. We never even talked about it, until the first time we had to lay for one of them. That was when you started middle school.”

“You did that thinking it would make me happy?”

Miguel frowned. “I never thought about it,” he said. “I didn't think I needed to. This's the Lower East. I mean, we make jokes about how fucked up this is. Now I'm wrong to want you out of this. But I see what you're saying.

“You don't want to leave if you gotta leave us behind. I know that, too. I would never leave Mamì and Papì here alone. So this is the first time in my life it's true: I'm stupid.”

“Shut up, Miguel,” Vasquez said. “Stupid people should be quiet people. Only reason I gotta keep telling you that is because you're stupid.”

Miguel turned away, smiling about the worn-out old joke. Outside the kitchen window, the night was dark. The apartment was quiet. They waited, and eventually Vasquez went to bed. The Russians didn't come, even though Miguel waited all night. Vasquez slept like the dead. In the morning when she woke up, she had a black eye from one of her brother's punches.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Guthrie drove to the office in the morning after picking up Vasquez. Before then, while the muggy night cooled, he spent a few hours in the Garment District trying to find nonexistent Russians. The little detective admitted to some paranoia. After years spent watching people in the city, a feeling sometimes crept onto him that the city watched in return. That morning, he and Vasquez cleaned the office, scrubbing away bloodstains and aligning the furniture. Guthrie replaced Vasquez's dead desktop monitor, but his own was still functional. They finished up by ordering pizza. Trahn brought a mouthful of conversation with two pizzas. On his last trip, he'd sold the pizzas to the police, but they wouldn't let him see the office.

The little Vietnamese's curiosity matched him up with Tommy Johnson. Guthrie called Tommy, reaching for an update on NYPD's efforts to fit Olsen for the Barbiedoll murders. Tommy invited himself to lunch. The tall young man wore mirrored sunglasses and his NYPD jogging suit; he walked a lap around the office, craning like a tourist, as soon as he came through the door.

“We scrubbed the blood up this morning,” Guthrie said.

“C'mon, Guth, you could've let me get a look first.” He peeled the mirrored sunglasses from his face and reached into the pizza box, coming out with a narrow slice.

“It ain't as entertaining as you think.”

The young man laughed. “It's got 'em talking in the big building.” He noticed Vasquez's black eye. “Oh shit!”

She scowled. She started to rough up his ears, but Guthrie stopped her. He asked her to walk Tommy through the shooting and take the shine from the story. The young man was learning his job as he went. Comparing the scene she described to the photos would help him. The little detective listened while Vasquez pointed out where the Russians had fallen, how they had rushed between the desks and couches, and mimicked the blonde's disordered cursing. After two run-throughs of crawling and barrages of shots, Tommy was watching her instead of staring at the office, a slice of pizza dangling from his hand.

Guthrie watched Tommy Johnson stumble for a minute, then said, “They didn't come here to kill us. They came here to ask a question. What was it?”

Vasquez snorted. “They wanted to know if we had a good lead.” She rescued a piece of pizza from the box and sat down at her desk.

“Sure, but that would be a lot of talking for muscle. Maybe they had a specific question.”

Tommy sprawled on the brown fur couch. “I don't know about that,” he said, “but this shooting caused a scene downtown. The Barbiedoll murders are hush-hush, but this splattered. They argued in the halls.”

“I would've liked to hear that,” Guthrie said.

“I think they're done with ‘GI Ken,'” Tommy said. “The gossip says he's ruled out on time and place, 'cause of a receipt or something—”

“When were we gonna hear that?” Vasquez demanded.

“After they didn't need it for leverage,” Guthrie said, and frowned at her. He waved Tommy Johnson to go on.

“And Bowman's a separate homicide, no connectivity beyond the resemblance. The other vics got no motives or whatever on them—missing, turned up dead, no suspects.”

“They had a take on the Russian shooters?”

Tommy downed a bite of pizza hurriedly. “Freelance. There's a lot of money around the Bowman case, no offense.”

“Major Case is squat. Somebody's cleaning up loose ends and they're not suspicious?” Guthrie darted a glance at the young Puerto Rican, then continued, “Let me get quiet. That's not worth talking about yet.”

“They got Olsen,” Tommy said, and shrugged.

The little detective nodded. “That helps,” he said. “All we have to clear is the Bowman murder. Fill in the blanks for me, though. Tell me what you know about the Barbie dolls.”

“I only know a few details on one vic—Cara Woodson. She was blond, two shots, no rape, found in Essex County at the edge of a scenic stop. She didn't have a vehicle. They couldn't find witnesses to place her anywhere, but the missing person report suggested shopping or the local honky-tonk.”

“She was the May seventeenth victim,” Guthrie said. “Essex? That's way upstate.”

“Yeah. A long way from the city. They wanted it to stick together. The sex angle pushed them, too, but now the gossip is going the other way. Maybe there is no Barbiedoll killer.”

“Tell that to the newspaper,” Guthrie muttered.

“The differences were little things,” Tommy Johnson said. “Not all of the vics were blond. One vic was missing her underwear, and her blouse was open, but still no sexual assault.”

“You're safe to talk about that?” Guthrie asked.

“It's gossip,” Tommy said, and shrugged. He slid forward to reach for another slice of pizza, and glanced at his watch. “Oh shit! Lunch is over. See ya, Guth.” The office door closed on his heels with a rattling slam.