by Jadie Jang
“Oh no, that’s terrible! No, I don’t know anything about it. Haven’t heard anything, either.” She sounded very definite, but my eyes flashed.
“Hm,” I said slowly, and then, very fast: “So they kidnapped her?”
Salli didn’t flinch. “Wow, no! I have no idea! I’d have heard if they’d done something dramatic like that. But they’re not in the kidnapping business, take it from me.” That was the truth.
“So they don’t have her.”
“No, Maya,” she said gently, “I don’t think they do.”
This was a blatant lie. Wow. And she was a good liar, too. I’d never have known if I didn’t have magical means. So WTF? They have her but they didn’t kidnap her? And how deep in this was Salli?
“And what about Bu Bu?”
“What about him?”
Not just shock, this time, but dread settled into my stomach. Salli knew Bu Bu. She must know …
Hardly daring to breathe, I asked, “Do you know what Bu Bu is?”
Salli rolled her eyes, which I’d never seen her do before. “Yes, Maya, I’ve seen an enforcer before. I know what one is. No, I don’t get involved in that side of the business. Not my swim lane.” All of that was true. Her eyes took on a delighted gleam. “I’ll tell you what, though. The rumor is that guy used to fight in the MMA.” No hint of deceit. So she didn’t know. My relief was like the opposite of a boner.
“Do you know where Bu Bu is?”
She frowned. “Mai, I’m not sure about these questions. What do you want with Bu Bu? How do you even know him? I mean … I know you used to …” She trailed off.
My alarm bells were screeching. “You know I used to what?”
“I’ve heard rumors that you have—had connections to the Celestials at some point. I didn’t know if they were true …”
This was the first I’d heard of such rumors and I was shocked. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve been. My brain was working frantically.
“Salli, you can’t believe everything you hear.”
“Well, to be honest, I didn’t. But this conversation is making me rethink.” That was definitely the clear-eyed, housing projects Salli speaking. Yeah, you and me both, beyotch. Time to get this convo back on track.
“Well, you know Ayo imports some stuff in the gray area?” I’d hinted as much before. This wasn’t news. She nodded. “Well, Bu Bu has a connection that she needs, but he disappeared. I just wanted to see if you knew where he was.”
“As it happens,” she said, “I was at the Bountiful office today and I heard … some people complaining that he’s been out of pocket since last night. He can’t have gotten far, though. I don’t think he’s here legally. And he owes some people some money.”
That was the truth.
And suddenly, I was overwhelmed by how badly I’d been misjudging Salli this whole time. I needed to withdraw, and reset. I mumbled a quick thanks and left her with a group of Inscrutablers lurking at the edges of the Occupy encampment’s general assembly meeting.
The fall air cleared my head, and by the time I was on a cloud flying over the bay, I’d calmed down. No, Salli being deeper into Tong biz than I’d thought was a good thing (for everyone except Salli herself, maybe.) She’d been a lot more helpful than I’d expected. And she’d confirmed that there was a clear connection between Bu Bu and Wayland: the Tong. Plus, she’d connected the Tong pretty solidly to Wayland’s werecat benevolent society. I made a mental note to get the werecats’ number from Ayo the next day. Maybe I’d get lucky and they’d even know where Bu Bu was.
I didn’t know what any of this could have to do with Dalisay, but the coincidence was starting to chafe.
CHAPTER FIVE
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Zeitgeist Bar, San Francisco
Rather than be exhausted after yesterday’s protest and assembly, a late-night recon/asskicking, a full day’s work, a tense meeting, and an intense and discomfiting revelation about a friend, I was completely jazzed (I wonder why.) I breezed into Zeitgeist for my date with Him, high on righteousness and community spirit. (Yes, I know, it was a “meeting,” but a girl can dream.)
Zeitgeist was a beer garden with almost no indoor seating. The evening temperature tonight was in the low sixties—practically tropical for SF—so the patio was packed. I scanned the crowd at a squint and got no flare, so I got a pitcher and some lime wedges (which I put all of into my own glass; the beer wasn’t Corona and nobody besides me likes lime in their cheap beer,) and found a planter in a corner with enough room for two butts, the pitcher, and two glasses. Tez showed up a couple minutes later, his beauty a dark light in the nighttime crowd. He headed directly for me through the row of hipsters squinting around trying to find their friends by sight—definitely some kind of were, Tez.
After initially finding me in the crowd, he didn’t look at me again, but rather leisurely side to side, like a predator on the prowl through the jungle. It looked reflexive, a habit, but even so, he was drawing all sorts of attention, even in the half-light—especially, though not exclusively, female attention. The females in question were drawing his attention, as well, and I finally got to see him smile. Left, right; this woman, that: what could only be called a cheese-eating grin was being passed out like Halloween candy, and a splay of swooning women were left in his wake.
Monkey was displeased at the performance. I wasn’t happy that my first personal experience of his smile was how it was applied to other women. He was here to meet me.
I surreptitiously pulled out a hair and flung it at him. It spread and settled gently over his front teeth, creating the illusion of a gap: a huge gap where his two front teeth, and one of his canines, were missing. The missing canine was a particularly nice touch: predators would rather lose a tail than a canine. The next woman he smiled at—a particularly pretty one—recoiled and looked hurriedly away. One by one, the women in his path followed suit.
He was frowning in bewilderment by the time he reached me.
“I hope you like PBR,” I said, “‘cause it’s a week to payday.”
He sat down carefully and filled a pint glass, while I recalled the hair I’d plastered over his teeth. He barely noticed, swiping absently at his mouth with the back of his hand. He drank the beer off in one go, while I checked out his look. He was wearing the hell out of a fitted, dark grey t-shirt with a screen print of several lines in red on it.
“It’s the routes of the Silk Road,” he said, slitting his eyes at me.
Silk Road? Oh god. Please tell me this guy isn’t a rice king!
“Let’s get the pleasantries over with,” I said. “What are you?”
He sighed reluctantly. “I’m a nagual. Do you know what that is?” He pronounced it “nah-whall.” It sounded Spanish.
I grinned. “No, but I’ll betcha a thousand dollars Ayo does.”
He smiled a little. “Yeah, it’s true. She seems to know more about it than I do. That kind of shocked me today.” He shifted his torso. “The anthropologists will tell you that we’re basically sorcerers or medicine men in the tradition of the Aztecs … but really, it’s a kind of magical propensity that gets passed down in bloodlines; like musicality, or u-shaped tongues. We have magic and can shapeshift, and we end up being village medicine men, you know? Really, I don’t know much.”
I perked up. “Weren’t you raised by your parents?”
“Well, yeah, but my Dad died when I was ten and he hadn’t really started teaching me stuff yet.” I perked back down. Not like me, then. “My mom wasn’t one, so she didn’t know that much. We keep it pretty close.” He looked down. “They came up from Mexico before I was born, so I didn’t have a whole extended family to teach me and anyway, our family on my Dad’s side was dwindling. I think I have a half-uncle or something, but no one knows where he is, and my grandparents are dead.”
He hesitated, like he could expand. But then he let out a breath and leaned back against a bush.
“So … now that we have that out of
the way—“ I said.
“Hold up. Your turn. What are you?”
“Can’t you tell?” I said snidely. He sniffed me. Yep, this is my life: hot dudes sniffing me.
“I have no idea what you are. You don’t even smell like anything definite. You smell like … I don’t know.”
I sighed. Here we go. “Truth is, I don’t know either.”
“Wow. … Don’t your parents—”
“Foster kid.”
“But someone must have—”
“Dropped anonymously at a fire station at 2 months old.”
He paused. “Really?”
“It sounds super melodrama, but it actually happens more than you’d think.”
“So you’re mixed blood?” He meant mixed supernat and human.
“Probably not.”
He paused again and parsed this. “So … are you, like … super-badass?” Now he was looking coy. Or … something.
“Pretty badass, yeah, if that kind of thing scares you.” My chin was up.
He smiled that pretty, pretty smile and—I realized suddenly—for the first time at me. My pores burned.
“Cool,” he said. “So … what do you turn into?”
“You first.”
He smiled wider. Oohh, he was pretty. “A jaguar.”
He yawned and shifted his torso again, showing me that catlike grace I’d always noticed and never fully identified. “Now you.”
“Well, I can turn into pretty much anything.” Yeah, I’m an idiot, I wanted to impress him.
“Really?”
“But my default is monkey.”
“A monkey?” He chuckled. “Monkeys are delicious!”
“Uh … you’ve … eaten a monkey?”
He chuckled. “Only a small one. What kind are you?” he asked.
“Oh, my default is just a standard rhesus macaque. Probably the most common monkey in Asia.”
In the brief silence—and the intense gaze from him—that ensued, I realized that I wasn’t sure if his interest was personal or epicurean. “… A pretty large and aggressive monkey, actually. But enough about me. Let’s talk about what brings you here tonight.”
“Oh … right.” He leaned back again, his doors closing. His body language was amazingly expressive. I guessed I knew why now. “Well, um, it’s my sister. I need you to get her for me.”
“Okay …?”
“Um, she’s the youngest, eighteen now, legally an adult, although her inner child is more outer, so I can’t sic the cops on her. And she said she was moving out and I wouldn’t see her again, so she’s not even really missing. But she’s just doing it to piss me off.”
“Back up. Start at the beginning. If she’s acting out to piss you off, does that mean you’re the boss of her?”
“Well, apparently not anymore, but yeah. I said my Dad was killed when I was ten?”
Whoa. “Was killed” is different from “died.” I nodded, and filed that away for later questioning.
“Well, Chucha was one. Then my mom died right after I graduated from Cal—she hung on two months just to get to see me walk in commencement. We had to set up a live feed so she could watch from her bed.” He thought for a moment, his face blank. “Chucha was twelve. She took it the hardest.”
“You have other siblings?”
“Yeah, there are four of us. I’m the oldest, then Manny, he’s twenty-two now, then Pronk, ze’s twenty, and Chucha.” I noted the pronouns, and started to feel the sharp poke of envy in my heart. I’d always wanted siblings, and Tez had one of each kind.
“You were their guardian?”
He dropped his chin to his chest. “Yeah, well, I shared custody with Tio Carlos—my mom’s younger brother who lives in Salinas. But he’s got three stalks of his own and couldn’t even afford the gas money to come up and see us every week. They’d take them once a month for a weekend so I could get a break, but you know….”
So many things were coming clear now. Suddenly responsible for three teenaged siblings at the age of twenty-one—no wonder he dropped out of the slam scene. He had to get a job. Maybe I shouldn’t envy him, but I still did.
“So, is she staying with Manny or … Pronk?”
“Naw, we all still live together. We got rent control. Manny just transferred to State, and Pronk is starting community college in the spring, so we have to keep expenses low.” His voice was dripping with parental pride. This guy had more moods than the ocean.
“So I’m guessing that Chucha’s the family black sheep?”
He flinched. “It’s not like that. They all acted out and screwed up their high school transcripts. And Manny and Pronk both kicked and screamed about how college is bullshit and then got real quiet when they had to work a shit job for a couple of years. We got our Padrinos—kind of—family friends—old friends of my parents—who live and work in the neighborhood—who kept an eye on them after school so they didn’t get into too much trouble. And I got them into after-school programs and stuff. But I think we just didn’t worry enough about Chucha, ‘cause she’s the baby.” He chewed his lip and rubbed his belly absently.
I stuck the shiv in quick. “And they’re all naguals too.”
He nodded, still absently, then realized what he’d done. He narrowed his eyes at me. “Don’t tell nobody,” he said, his voice full of a menace I’d never heard from him before. I shivered. Definitely more moods than the ocean.
“Do they turn into cats too?”
“Manny’s a donkey and Pronk’s a deer. So with Manny, you just gotta make sure he gets stubborn about the right thing, and then you can’t stop him. And with Pronk, you gotta hook zem with zeir curiosity, while not scaring zem away. So once you get them both on the right path, it’s all cookies and beer.”
“A donkey and a deer?”
“Well … it depends on what day you’re born. Not my fault.” He grinned briefly to himself at this and I suspected it was something he said a lot around the house.
“And Chucha?”
“Dog,” he said, heavy with meaning. I looked askance; I didn’t know dogs; they didn’t like me. “Well, some dogs, they’re dominant, and, although they’re very loyal, they think their humans belong to them and not the other way around. And they do what they want, they sit on the couch, and they steal the meat, and they poop where they want—”
“Got it. Doesn’t take to authority. And you two get along like cats and dogs.”
“Yeah, that’s the other problem,” he said quietly.
“So she left home at eighteen after you had a blowout. Am I warm?”
“Smokin’. … Thing is, she got all messed up without anybody knowing. Even the other kids didn’t know, they just knew she was skipping school sometimes. It just kills me, you know? She’s the brightest bulb on our string. She coulda gotten into any ivy league; she was in the GATE program until Mom died. And the pep squad. I guess I didn’t realize how hard she took it.”
I was getting whiplash from the whipping between proud, coy, predatory, and guilty. Boy, this dude had a lot of emotions to deal with. And looked great doing it. I stayed shut and let him get on with it. A little more guilt, an arrest, a high school expulsion, a GED, and some slacking later:
“… so I told her she had to get a job and she said she already had.”
“Did she tell you what it was?”
“She’s running with the San Antonios. You know, over in East Oakland. Fruitvale. That’s when we had the fight. Literally—physically. … Actually she set me back a bit.”
For a moment I just looked at him uncomprehendingly, until understanding bit my brain, hard. The San Antonios were the biggest gang in Oakland, a branch of the Bones that spread from Central America, through Mexico, all the way up to the Canadian border. They were, among other things, street soldiers for the Serpiente Cartel. I’d encountered a few of the Chicago Bones crews in my misspent teenage years. That was why Ayo had pushed Tez at me. This was doubly bad news: that I’d have to connect with a Bones c
rew, and that Tez would, eventually, discover why Ayo thought I was the perfect person to extract his baby sister from such sinister hands.
The pause had gone on too long. “So she can take you?” I asked with a false sneer.
He looked scornful. “Did you miss the ‘manipulative’ part? Of course not, but she can fight me until I have to give in or really hurt her, and she doesn’t hesitate. I do.”
“So she can take you.”
He thought for a moment. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. She can.” He looked up expectantly and said, as if giving me all the information I needed: “She’s holing up at their HQ.”
“Okay, why don’t you just go get her?”
“Uh, I don’t run with 23rd St. but … there’s a territory thing. Some of my friends are 23rd St. and I’m from this hood and … well, for some kids—not me, but some—they kinda replace the traditional village structure to a certain extent, you know? … And, well, each village would have a medicine man or priest or something, right? I mean, I’m not trained, and this isn’t the village and I’ve been very clear about not being 23rd St.’s bitch and they know they can’t make me. I mean, you know we’re stronger and faster … maybe you don’t know—
“All shapeshifters are,” I said, in Ayo-mode. “The power has to go somewhere when we’re not shifting. Go on.”
“Okay. Well, you know, if someone from the block gets hurt or something, maybe there’s something I can do about it. Somebody has some bad luck, maybe I know a trick or two. That kind of thing. You know.”
From working for Ayo for five years, I did know. “And maybe they get you some woo-woo supplies, too?” I suggested slyly.
He looked disturbed. “I’m not a stereotype.” Whoops, no, make that “offended.”
“Come on, Tez. We’re all connected to organized crime in some way. That’s the breaks when you’re underground. You mean to tell me they never do you favors?”
He sealed his lips demonstratively. Okay. I see you, tho’. I waited for a bit but he was being stubborn now. Time to shift gears.
“So does everyone in your neighborhood know about you? No secrets?”