Midnight Taxi Tango (4 page)

Kia

A
ll the way down the bustling avenues of East Williamsburg, bright and audacious with hot new sales, Dominican cats throwing game, old ladies selling mango, and bachata on ten, Gio stays with me. If I turn around quick, maybe I'd catch him, that flash of a second before he vanishes again into the ether. I have some trippy drum 'n' bass shit in my ears, a new track from an underground DJ out of Jersey I downloaded last night, and it moves me along at a steady strut, past the cavernous prison facade of Woodhull Hospital and into Bed-Stuy, and Gio remains. It is a friendly haunting, this; got none of the wretched desperation that some folks come in to see Baba Eddie about. But then, Baba always says most ghosts aren't as bad as all that, not like in the movies where every ghoul is dedicated to emptying all your cabinets and then eating your brains. That, Baba has informed me, is a big bag of bullshit.

I pass a young white cop standing in front of a vacant lot. “Hey, Sideshow Bob!” he yells.
Ignore, ignore, ignore
. “Can I get your number?”

I stop in my tracks. Turn. “The fuck part of you calling me a cartoon character seems like it would be endearing?”

He raises both hands and eyebrows. “Whoa, easy! I was just—”

I turn around, keep walking. “I'm a child, you pervert. Suck my sideshow dick.”

It doesn't make sense, I know, and probably dangerous as fuck—those weed-strewn lots would be easy to disappear into—but Gio's absence rages through me and all I know is that fire. The cop doesn't follow, probably just shrugs and tries his luck with the next teenage girl. And still, the memories press down, relentless.

• • •

I gasped when I realized we weren't alone in the wooded area behind Jeremy Fern's house. The men standing around us—they didn't walk there; we would've heard them. They just appeared out of the darkness. There were six of them. They had pale, almost greenish skin, broad shoulders, bugged-out eyes, and smirking, deeply lined faces. They hunched over slightly, all of them the same way. I almost screamed when I noticed them, but I kept it in. They just stood there—staring like Gio at Jeremy's entrancing performance. Ever so slowly, I wrapped my little hand around Gio's wrist. He was about to shush me, but I squeezed, squeezed so hard he shut up. It was just the tiniest of gasps he let out when he finally saw the men. I thought it was too loud, but they didn't look over, just kept those pushed-out eyes squinting straight ahead at Jeremy's house. The air filled with whispers—a dissonant hissing and clicking.

Then they started walking, all at the same time. They moved through the trees into the backyard. It was a slow, deliberate walk, each step careful and precise, long arms dangling by their sides. I couldn't stop staring at them, but something else in the corner of my eye was tweaking for my attention. Something was moving. I looked, but it was so dark, the trees were just shadows against the night. Still, there was movement. The trees, the trees were moving. They were alive somehow, shifting, writhing in the darkness. No.
I stepped closer to look at the nearest one to me. No. It was alive with insects. Shiny-backed cockroaches swarmed over the thing, the big kind, but they weren't the normal dark orange. They were pale, almost pink.

I opened my mouth to scream, and a hand wrapped around it. I was about to start fighting for my life when I smelled that shea butter/BO mix that I knew so well. Giovanni. He lifted me up and turned me around. “Don't say a fucking word,” he hissed. “Don't even fucking cry.”

I nodded, tears streaming down my face. Giovanni would make everything alright. He always did. Giovanni would get me out of here.

“Listen to me, Kia. Go home.” My stomach plummeted. “Go now.”

“N . . .” I started to say, but he shushed me with a look.

“Don't look back. Just go. I'll be home soon.”

I shook my head.

“Kia.” No debate, no whining. This was not a game. And I had no choices. “Go.” He put me down, turned to where the six men made their slow path toward Jeremy's house.

The trees all around me crawled with pale roaches. I took a step backward, but Gio didn't even look to see if I'd gone. He launched down the hill, quiet as a ninja. I saw the light glint over his muscly arm, saw a splotch against it, another roach, just before he swiped it off. I cringed. My whole body wanted to vanish, burst out of the trees and get as far away as I could. But my heart wouldn't let me turn away from my cousin. I stood perfectly still, caught between the two impossible choices, and anyway: useless.

Gio came up behind the first man at a sliding crouch. He anchored one leg in the dirt and flew up into the air, flashing the other leg out in a stunning roundhouse kick. His foot found its mark; the man collapsed with an eerie silence. I think Gio was as stunned as I was—for a solid three seconds he just stood there gaping at the man sprawled on the
ground. The others didn't seem to notice, or if they did they didn't care; the slow march toward the house continued.

I took a few steps down the hill. I couldn't watch, couldn't stop watching. Gio stepped over the one he'd taken out, but a hand came up from the ground and wrapped around his leg, dropping him to one knee. The man rose up fast, faster than he should've been able to after taking a hit like that. Two of the other men stopped and turned slowly toward the fray. Gio stabilized himself in a sturdy horse-riding stance, so he was ready when the blow came. It was clumsy and slow, like the man couldn't quite get his limbs to do what he wanted them to, but I could tell from the way Gio leaned to the side that there was an unnatural force to it. Gio sidestepped and let the weight of the guy's hit do the work, just like we'd been taught. As the man stumbled forward, Gio brought his elbow down on the back of his head.

The two other men moved in from either side. Gio's hoarse yell cut through the quiet suburban night: “Jeremy! Run!” Even the attackers seemed startled. Jeremy appeared at the window, and everyone looked up at him. Gio took advantage of the confusion, kicking in the kneecaps of one man and then spin smashing the other with another roundhouse. The first was done; I saw him crumple, again with that impossible silence, but the second guy recovered quickly and barreled into Gio.

The back door of the house swung open, and Jeremy gaped out. “What's going on? Giovanni?” It was like an electric shock went through the three men not busy with Gio. They lurched forward, crowding around Jeremy, blocking the door from closing.

“Get inside!” Gio yelled from the ground. Then the man smashed him hard across the face, and he fell limp.

I ran. I ran straight into the center of all that hell. Felt something tickle my arm and swiped it off over and over without bothering to even look at what it was. The man was
crouching in the dirt with his back to me, and me, I thought of death. No strategy, no caution: just death. Because all my little body could do was surge forward even while my mind screamed at it to turn back, and the man was only a few steps from me now.

Gio's leg came out of nowhere, swept like a lightning bolt along the ground and took the guy's legs right out from under him. You could actually hear the swoosh of wind, the guy fell so fast. Before I could even yell, the man was on the ground and Gio was over him, and then Gio's foot was smashing down again and again on the man's face. I heard the squishing destruction of flesh, then a much sharper cracking sound, and then it was just a dull thud, over and over again, and Gio's sobbing breaths.

And then something started moving. I saw Gio tense, but it wasn't the man. It was something else. The broken skin of his face writhed to life, and a thousand pale cockroaches that had been his skin scattered away. More poured out of his sleeves, from under his collar, swarmed off his hands to reveal shreds of flesh clinging to raggedy bone. Gio and I both stepped back, but the roaches weren't interested in us; they scattered outward in a confused swarm and then flushed as one toward the house. Jeremy.

“No!” Gio yelled. I couldn't even catch my breath before he'd turned and stormed past the roach swarm through the back door.

“Gio!” I yelled. We were still alive. Why couldn't he understand what a miracle that was? A few minutes ago I thought everything was over and now we were alive: both of us! I hated my cousin almost as much as I loved him right then. The night was so quiet. I heard a few night birds chirping in the trees above me. Someone was watching TV in a house nearby, a reality show, from the sound of it. Had no one heard us screaming? For a terrible moment I wondered if any of it had even happened. Then I walked shakily toward the house, barely breathing, barely conscious.

Inside, there was a dim little alcove with winter jackets hung up and a cubby area full of weathered board games. Something glinted up from the short stairwell leading into the kitchen. Not roaches; it was perfectly still: blood. I moved faster, stepping around the wet spots and up into the kitchen: all dark, no one there. From somewhere in the house, Gio was yelling: “Jeremy? Jeremy?” I released a little dark sandbag of weight from my heart. Gio was safe for the moment. If he was looking for Jeremy, he wasn't fighting the freaky cockroach men. If he was looking for Jeremy, he was alive. The thought of ending this with Gio still intact made me want to sit down at the kitchen table and sob, but I kept going, through a winding hallway, past the living room, moderately fancy and very lived in, and up the stairs.

“I told you to . . .” Gio mumbled when he saw me. “I thought I told you to . . .” His eyes were so wide, the way a horse's look in movies when they get shot, like you didn't know they could get so wide, that such a noble, magnificent creature could actually be afraid. “He's gone.” Gio fell against the wall and slid down into a crouch, sobbing. “They got him.”

“Gio.” My little nine-year-old voice sounded calm, authoritative, for the first time in my life. And there I was still in my tutu. I felt ridiculous. “We gotta go, Gio. We gotta go now.”

He looked up. I'd broken through to him. He nodded, took the trembling hand I'd reached out to him, and stood.

• • •

The pulsing beat settles into a wide-open synth drone, echoing high hats and wandering sax riffs, and I'm standing outside the rec center, sniffling back tears.

The night of the roaches wasn't the last time I saw Giovanni, but it might as well have been. In the weeks after Jeremy disappeared, Gio withdrew deeper and deeper into himself until one day he was just gone. His parents had kicked
him out years earlier, but my dad loved Gio like a long-lost son. We wallpapered the neighborhood with flyers, pestered the police about it every day, put search teams together to scour all the back corners and abandoned fields. Nothing. The boy was just gone. It barely got a blurb in the papers, of course—a little “missing” notice in the local crime section of the same issue that had a moving tribute to Jeremy on the front page.

I've made up so many stories. But the practical part of me knew he was just a hurt kid who had been through some fucked-up shit he couldn't make sense of, couldn't even tell anyone about. But then again, so was I.

And then he was gone and I was truly alone.

The ugly metal door squeaks open and Karina pokes her head out. “You comin' in, Kia? They got a new teacher, and he fine as fuck.”

I laugh and tell her I'll be in in a sec and sniffle again, quickly so she doesn't notice, and then she's gone and I'm alone with the ugly empty sky and big-ass brick project houses and lingering winter and there's no more memories, no more Gio, just me and the world.

I should've told Karina to come out and then told her everything. I want to. But I also don't. Because right now, I'm busy saying good-bye. Giovanni has been with me all day, just like those ghosts that Carlos and Baba Eddie always talking about. Which means Gio's gone. Really gone. I pull off my headphones and open the metal door. Pause to take a deep breath and make sure my eyes aren't leaking. Dead and gone. I walk inside. Gone. Which means I have to stop pretending, stop making up stories, and finally, finally, for real this time, let go.

So I do.

Carlos

A
ll the way at the far end of Court Street, long after the chic provincial bakeries have given way to old-school pizza parlors and barber shops, there is a pay phone. There ain't many left in this city. It sits outside a train station right where bourgie residential Brooklyn becomes industrial-wasteland Brooklyn. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway looms over it, a hulking mass of corrugated steel and concrete; traffic lurches along in groans and honks.

The regular ol' fully dead folks use their telepathy shit to get in touch with each other—it's like each one got a cell phone implanted in their translucent-ass brains. Whatever asshole makes the rules for botched resurrections and inbetweeners decided that me being half dead meant I only got one-way reception: the Council can blurt their damned protocol updates and bossy, micromanaging messages directly into my brain, but when I want to reach out, I gotta use the phone.

I plop in some quarters and wait as my own voice asks me to please leave a message for Jimmy's Hat Shop (their idea). “Yeah, listen,” I say after the tone. “Send me Bell. I know she's on disciplinary hiatus or whatever y'all call it, but I'm working on something and I think I can bring her back into the fold.”

I pause and roll my eyes. They have this new thing where they want names for cases and brief descriptions, and I know without one they'll never send me Bell. I exhale, and my breath becomes a small cloud and rises toward the highway.

“Situation: Park Disaster. Status: Open. Summary: Dudes are getting fu . . . hurt. At Von King Park. In repeated succession. Reason enough to suspect nefarious spiritual . . . shit.”

I shake my head.

“That is all.”

I have the unusual thought that maybe that really is all and then I hang up. Maybe the rash of disasters is the uncaring hand of chance, playing with all of us. It doesn't matter really. I grab a coffee from the corner store and settle into my regular spot beside a massive concrete leg of the BQE. Pigeons flutter off, consult with each other in the shadows of the dingy overpass, swarm back. Some loud-ass tweens run across the street, screeching each other's names to the tune of some rap song that's been playing every point-seven seconds on the radio. Two old men in parkas stroll past, muttering to each other. A businesswoman stands in front of me, checks her phone, looks left, right, left again, and then wanders off.

None of them are Gregorio Franco.

I sip my coffee and scowl.

• • •

Sasha, her brother, Trevor, and I died the same rainy night at the foot of the archway at Grand Army Plaza. They woke up a few days later at a safe house along with Gregorio Franco, Marie St. Pierre, and a few others who would go on to become the Survivors. They compared notes when they came back around, but there was barely anything there; they were half-dead amnesiacs. Some fully alive but grim-faced and mostly silent man known only as Terra was there at first—Sasha told Baba Eddie about him as she recovered on my couch last year. Terra tended to their wounds, got a
mournful faraway look in his eyes when they asked him questions, and then vanished shortly after and no one was able to track him down.

And me? I woke up at Mama Esther's. Only a shred of that night remains with me; it's all I have left of my life before dying. Three figures, hooded, with ski masks on, staring down at me as I die. One's wounded, breathing heavy, and as the night sky behind them bleeds over everything else, I'm relieved I did some damage before getting got myself, that I went down fighting. That's it.

A ghost named Pasternak was anchored to the archway and witnessed the whole thing, but all he gave me were vague, obnoxious riddles—
There were seven of you, and none survived. And then there were five.
The Council sent me after Trevor when he tried to help an ancient necromancer named Sarcofastas tear open a hole to the Underworld. I offed Trevor and then tracked down Sasha and, like an asshole, fell in love with her. She has a slender, sullen face with perfectly round cheeks and then she grins and tilts her head just so—there's mischief in that smile; it lets you in on a secret and then light catches the length of her neck, a caress, and it's a wrap. Besides all that, she understood. Without using all that clever finding-shit-out magic that we halfies have, she just knew. Sure, some of it was because she was like me, but there was an intuition at work deeper than all that.

When she figured out what I'd done, she impaled me on my own sword and aligned with Sarco, which caused the Council to send me after her (once I'd healed up, thanks to Baba Eddie and a Haitian surgeon named Dr. Tijou), and one sweltering afternoon last summer, I traced the woman I loved to this very spot, under this very highway, across the street from one of the few pay phones left in Brooklyn.

The man she was meeting with had a full beard and wore a long brown jacket and fedora; Gregorio Franco, Sasha told me later, as she recovered from the fight with Sarco.
Gregorio looked tired; deep lines etched his face and his off-gray paleness. They exchanged something, a small package, and then I stayed on Sasha's trail and Gregorio ambled off slowly toward the bay.

And then Sarco destroyed Pasternak, and Sasha and I killed Sarco with the help of a ravenous squad of tiny soul-devouring creatures, the ngks, and Sasha vanished again, this time for good, leaving behind the vague sense that she was as heartbroken as I was about the whole thing and an old cassette tape with the saddest song in the world. Which means Gregorio Franco is the only lead I got to figuring out what the hell happened that night and who I was before I died.

And where Sasha is.

It's not much.

Probably this was a random meeting spot. Probably they were smart enough to change up their rendezvous locations. Probably. But she abandoned her apartment on Ocean Avenue and went underground after shit hit the fan, and I have nothing else to go on. And it's a few hours before sunset still, a breezy March day, and I have a warm coffee in one hand and my cane-blade in the other, and despite what I told Riley and Baba Eddie, ever since Sasha left, all I feel is broken inside.

• • •

“Why you always hang out here?” Riley asks when he shows up next to me.

“Good afternoon to you too.”

“I mean, you pigeon hunting? Do you have a sudden affinity for neo-postwar pregentrification, mediocre residential architecture and highways? Are you perhaps . . . high?”

I just shake my head.

“Or are you just depressed and this is one of those weird depressed-people things?”

“Riley, I'm not depressed, man. Get off it.”

He eyes me and then lets it go. “What we doing?”

Before I can answer, a squat shining form slides up on my other side. “Soulcatcher Bell,” I say. “Meet Agent Riley Washington.”

Bell nods curtly. She's middle-aged, white, and entirely unremarkable. Up till her sudden change of heart, she'd been one of the Council's most effective and ruthless 'catchers.

“How you feeling, Sylvia?” Riley says. “They got you on admin work since the fallout?”

“Desk duty at Sunset Park HQ while they sort through the paperwork and decide what to do with me.” She pauses, looks us both over. “Why am I here?”

“I was wondering that too,” Riley says.

“Why'd you do it?” I ask.

Sylvia's glare is unwavering, her frown sharp. “Honestly,” she says, and her shoulders relax like the word let out some long-pent up air. “It just didn't seem right to me, cutting those old ghosts down. I was always taught to respect my elders. Put my mom in a nursing home out in Hempstead when I was alive and I never felt right about it.”

She glares at me again, gauging my reaction. I nod at her to go on.

“And there they were, all these geriatric spirits crawling into bed every night with their living loved ones and then mingling with them in the day, playing bridge, joking around, you know—what folks do. Being friends. They weren't hurting anyone. They were just being.”

“And your squad?”

Bell inhales deeply and closes her eyes. The shadows have grown long around us, the orange haze of sunset seeping in past factories and support beams. Pigeons glide a smooth spiral over the rooftops toward the darkening sky. I can see that whatever it was that snapped in Sylvia Bell that night remains snapped. She's tired of making shit up,
tired of the bureaucracy and bullshit and resigned to whatever ridiculous fate the Council assigns her.

“Soulcatcher Squad 9 has been through a lot these past few years since I took over as commander, Agent Delacruz.”

“Carlos.”

“Carlos. They are loyal to a fault, and when I ask something of them, they comply. They functioned that night exactly within the parameters of Council protocol.”

“By which you mean,” Riley puts in, “they did what you told them to, knowing full well it was a blatant infraction of Council protocol.”

Bell nods. “They're good soldiers.”

Riley glares at her for a few seconds, and when she doesn't flinch, he smiles. “I like you, Sylvia.”

Sylvia Bell doesn't respond.

“You want to help us with a fucked-up situation in Von King Park?”

“I'm on desk du—”

“Don't worry about that,” I say. “We'll work it out with the dickbags upstairs. I just wanted to make sure you were in before I pulled you off the desk and back into the field. For all I know you like the des—”

“I'm in,” Bell says. I figured. Desk duty is like the Deeper Death to soulcatchers like Bell. A tiny smile crosses her face before she fades into the late-afternoon twilight.

• • •

“You plottin' something?” Riley asks as we meander through the industrial Brooklyn backstreets.

“Right now—just gathering folks.” It's a little after sunset, the sky a hazy navy blue. Streetlights blink to life around us. Some unspoken purpose calls me forward, beckoning like a siren song from Von King Park.

“Then why you walkin' so fast, man? You only fast walk when you plottin'.”

“I like what Sylvia did.”

“Me too. Council love being on that Council-type bullshit. But she gotta be more strategic if she wanna stick around and keep fucking shit up.”

“That's what I'm thinking.”

We cross Atlantic Avenue, four bustling lanes of traffic, and cut north toward Bed-Stuy. “And so do we.”