Midnight Taxi Tango
Page 16
• • •
We don’t have much time.
The gunfight will have sent the primary targets into a scatter. They’re in a room down the hall from here, presumably with three other armed guards. One will probably bust through the far door in another couple seconds. He’ll be heavily armed, one of the paras, and probably more than a little panicked to find the place thick with chemical smoke. The other two bodyguards will escort the conglomerate rep and the warlord down a back stairwell and then make a break for their armored cars.
No one gets out alive, Charo told us. No one.
I holster the Glock and crouch low, loosening the dagger from its ankle sheath. Close combat and near blindness is no time to be shooting. I duck out of the elevator, cut a hard left, and then stride through the smoke in the direction of the closest ’cuda gunman, staying low. He’d been crouching behind a toppled wooden table. He appears suddenly out of the fog, turning toward me as he wipes at his watering eyes with one hand and waves his gun with the other. I catch his gun wrist lest he try anything cute while he’s dying and then jam my blade up through the soft meat of his jaw and into his brain. He drops as I hear the far door swing open across the room—that’ll be the bodyguard. I crouch and inch forward. Someone yells, “¿Qúe carajo?” and I hit the deck. Another ’cuda guy comes flailing out of the smoke just as machine-gun fire explodes through the room, eviscerating him. The ’cuda’s top half flails forward over his tattered midsection, spraying me with innards; then he drops to his knees and crumples on top of me.
Presuming they’re not hit, Rohan and Bri will be converging on the gunman now. Memo’s probably somewhere down low, making sure no one has a pulse. I crawl forward, reach the edge of the room just in time to see Bri emerge from the smoke, gas mask on, gun pointed at the bodyguard’s temple. He swings around a second too late—her bullet cuts through skin, skull, and brain and explodes out the far side of his head in a splatter of red and pink. He drops.
I stand, nod at Bri, and turn back into the fog. “Memo?”
His voice comes from the floor a few feet to my right. “Aquí.” Then he rises out of the fog, still maskless, like some hulking angel of death.
“Rohan went back down the stairwell to head them off,” Bri reports.
“Good. Memo, make sure everything’s clean up here. Bri, come.”
We’re halfway down the stairs when my phone vibrates. Charo usually doesn’t call during hits, but I tap my earpiece one time to answer in case there’s a change of plans. “Go.”
“Uh . . . hello?” It’s a girl’s voice. Vaguely familiar. I pull off my gas mask. Last time I answer during a job without checking the number. “Is this Reza?”
Ah, yes. “Listen, Carlos’s little friend, right?”
“This a bad time?”
Ha. But there’s something in her voice that catches me. She’s terrified. There’s no imaginable way she’d be so polite if this wasn’t serious. “Very. What’s wrong?”
Bri shoots me a concerned look as we reach the first floor. She puts her ear against the door leading out to the front corridor.
“It’s Carlos,” Kia says. “Something’s wrong with him.”
“We did a thing . . . earlier tonight. He might’ve taken it a little hard. Tell him to get some sleep and I’ll give him a ca—”
“No. Listen. He’s like . . . unconscious. Or no, his eyes are open, but he’s not responding. He’s just saying shit.”
“Saying what?”
“Like . . . words. Lots of them. I don’t know what to do. If I call nine-one-one, he’ll never forgive me, and that EMT guy Victor isn’t picking up his phone. And I don’t know how to reach of any Carlos’s . . . other . . . people.”
Spirits. I mean shit, neither do I.
Bri cracks the door, slides through gun first. I follow. The corridor’s empty.
“Kia, I gotta go. I’m in the middle of something . . .”
“But . . .”
Gunfire erupts a few rooms away.
“Reza?” Kia says in my ear. “Are you okay?”
“Listen, I promise I’ll swing through as soon as I can, okay? Text me Carlos’s address. I’ll be there . . . tonight.”
“Come soon,” she says, sounding very much like a small child.
The door to the lounge flies open and Rohan barrels through it backward, guns blazing. Bri and I flatten against the walls on either side. Rohan rolls off to the side as automatic fire bursts out of the lounge. He leaves a splatter of blood on the white linoleum floor. I make a mental note to make sure that gets cleaned before we make our final exit. Rohan crouches in front of the elevator, panting. He shows me two fingers and nods. That means he took out the two main targets. Which means only the paramilitary bodyguards are left, not counting the front gate guard—and he’s probably about to make an unscheduled appearance.
I motion to Bri, and she soft-steps along the corridor wall and disappears around the corner. A rustle of clothing and scattered footsteps from within the lounge means at least one of the bodyguards is making his move. Rohan ducks behind a metal wastebin. A thick guy runs through the door, AK-47 pointed ahead of him, and pauses. I blow his brains out the front of his head. The big guy collapses, and the stairway door opens a crack. All our guns train on it. Memo steps out, gun first. “Hey, guys!” He flashes a winning grin. “The para dude came running up the back stairs. I broke his neck. That everyone?”
Bri strolls around the corner. She’s breathing heavily, and her usually immaculate makeup is smeared. She cleans blood off an arm-length knife with a dark blue uniform shirt. “That’s everyone,” she says.
• • •
“It’s done,” I tell Charo an hour later as we slide through scattered late-night traffic on the LIE. The blood has been cleaned, security footage destroyed, bodies stripped of IDs and laid side by side on their backs. One of the ’cudas will find them tomorrow and they’ll be incinerated. They will have their suspicions, sure, but Charo’s right—the thing about taking out secretive people is they do your work for you: their concealing conceals us too. The conglomerate exec will be a missing person, “a tragic disappearance,” “a terrible loss,” and then an unsolved mystery, gathering dust in some detective’s archive.
“How’d it go?”
“Mostly smooth. Rohan got grazed on the arm, Memo took one to the shoulder, in and out.”
“I’m fine!” Memo yells from the back.
“Neither serious,” I add.
“Good,” Charo grunts. “Tijou is here and ready. Anything loud happen outside?”
“No, Bri handled that.” Beside me, Bri extends a fist and I dap it.
“Well done,” Charo says.
“You don’t sound happy, Charo.”
“When, in the years we’ve known each other, Reza, have I ever sounded happy?”
“You sound concerned.”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t feel like enough.”
“You want to kill all the evil men in the world, Charo? It’ll take some time.”
“Lo sé. But that’s not it.”
“What, then?” I exit onto the Jackie Robinson. Cypress Hills Cemetery flows past on either side of us.
“I don’t know, Reza.”
“Have a coffee, man. Get some sleep. You can’t be having these existential crises every time we . . . well, every time.”
“Alright, Reza. How far out are you?”
“We’re close,” I say. “But I’m dropping off the crew and then dipping.”
“Oh?”
“Gotta see about a friend.”
CYCLE THREE
INTO THE UNDERGROUND
Cuentan los que vieron
que los guapos culebrearon con sus cuerpos
y buscaron afanosos el descuido del contrario
y en un claro de la guardia
hasta el mango su facón.
Those who saw it told the tale:
two fine young men, writhing like snakes,
each searching for a lapse of vigilance in the other;
until the young man of Palermo found his moment,
and buried his dagger into the cop,
all the way to the hilt.
“La puñalada”
milonga, 1951
Celedonio Flores
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Carlos
. . . Fence plate a butter knife a pillow a rail a pigeon a stick of bubble gum a plastic flower a menu a prosthetic leg a pound cake a bag of chips a car radio an old man on a respirator his wife waiting quietly beside him a slice of pizza a rusted-out boat in an abandoned lot of trash overgrown weeds two carved figurines a bicycle a chair a lawn mower a change machine a toy robot a bow and arrow a balloon stuck in a tree branch and mostly deflated a pile of leaves a hand, open, light brown with one ring swinging toward me
“Carlos!”
the turnstile at a metro stop a pit bull a radiator a pair of scissors an envelope a hand, open, light brown skin with one ring swinging toward me.
“Car!”
Again.
“Fucking!”
Again.
“Los!”
Reza releases the collar of my shirt and stands over me, panting. “The fuck happened?” I say.
Kia pokes her head out from behind Reza. Her eyes are puffy like she spent all of last night bawling, and I want to know why but words aren’t making sense in my mouth yet. “Is that all it took?” Kia says. “I coulda done that.”
“The fuck . . .” I’m in my apartment. On my bed. My face is burning like someone threw hot water in it. Reza. Kia. “. . . happened?”
Sasha.
I thrash around uselessly for a second.
The twins. Our twins.
I’m up, breaking for the door. Reza stops me with a hand on my chest. Only takes a slight shove to hurl me back on the bed. This is the second rude awakening in as many days, and I’m surly about it, but more importantly: Sasha.
The twins.
Reza just shakes her head. Kia steps in front of her, crosses her arms over her chest. “You were out, man. Just lyin’ there mumbling all kindsa . . .”
“I gotta . . . I gotta . . .”
“Gotta what, man? We don’t know where they are. You don’t know where they are. What you gonna do?”
“I was searching.”
“Is that what you call it?”
This is also the second time I’ve cast my spiritual net too far and blown out my circuits trying to reach Sasha. I stand, and a million tiny lights erupt across my vision. Reza and Kia are on either side of me, and then another set of hands wraps around me and lifts me; they’re firm but not unkind. The hands let me down into the easy chair next to my bed. A tall, well-built young man looks down at me, his brow creased with concern. His hair is shaved close to his head, and he’s wearing track pants and a T-shirt. Got that same defiant chin Kia has, face inclining sharply from the cheeks, the same sharp eyebrows making him look somewhat put out, probably even when he smiles.
“Carlos,” Kia says, appearing even tinier than usual beside the guy. “This is my long-dead cousin, Giovanni.”
I rub my eyes. Too much happening. “Nice to meet you, Gio.” He takes my hand and shakes it with both of his, almost crushing it.
“The pleasure is mine,” Gio says.
“You’re not dead though,” I say. “So that’s nice.”
“I’m gonna make coffee,” Reza says. “We have to talk.”
“I love you,” I mumble. Reza snorts as she leaves, but I mean it.
• • •
They make a big deal out of setting up everything all nice for me on the kitchen counter. Reza puts my coffee on a saucer and Kia places my Malagueñas next to me with an ashtray like I’m at some fancy cigar lounge. Giovanni sits across from me and opens a pack of cookies. He’s maybe in his midtwenties, body long and lanky but well toned: a gymnast or a dancer. Each movement is crisp and precise like Reza’s, but he flows better; it would seem like a performance if it wasn’t so smooth and genuine. His muscles ripple beneath his tight gray T-shirt as he removes a cookie with two fingers, appreciates it momentarily, and then takes one bite, chewing with consideration.
“Carlos,” Reza says. “We’ve put some pieces together while you were . . . napping.”
“Oh?”
“There were some elements in the equation we weren’t aware of.” Reza looks pointedly at Kia.
“More specifically,” Kia says, “we found a link.” She places a laptop on the counter, opens it, and turns the screen to face me. “Which may turn out to be a pattern. The Blattodeons, that’s what they’re called apparently”—she looks at Gio for confirmation and he nods—“are trying to make a clean sweep.”
A chart of names and interconnected lines spreads across Kia’s laptop screen. “How do you mean?” I ask.
“They’re going after anyone that knows they exist,” Reza says. “There was Shelly, right? She’d seen them before. Her own diary said so. They targeted her. The call that came in the night I found Angie requested Shelly directly. When she got away, they went after her again, and they got her in the same way Kia was attacked.”
“Right,” I say. “But . . .” My stomach turns a small somersault. “You?”
Kia nods.
“We both saw them,” Giovanni says. “Seven years ago, in Queens. This boy I liked back then kept talking about strange men outside his house, and one night I took Kia with me to check up on him and they came. They . . . they took him.”
I look at Kia.
“Close your mouth,” Kia says. “It’s all true.”
“The boy they took that night was Jeremy Fern,” Reza says. “The house was the one we . . . visited earlier.”
I take a long sip of coffee, my eyes wide.
“And I was all the way fucked up,” Giovanni says. “I fought off one of them and went into his house after the others. When I got to the second floor, they had already started to swarm him.” His eyes betray nothing; he tells it like he’s remembering something merely odd or unusual. “They were all over his body, his face, coming out of his mouth.” Giovanni shakes his head. “I should’ve run, done something, but . . . I just stared, transfixed. It was just a few seconds, really. I snapped out of it and charged them, but he held up his hand. He did. Jeremy. The three of them just looked at me. The cockroach guys had already sent most of their roaches on to Jeremy, so they were just raggedy skin on bone. Corpses. Jeremy stared out from behind that swarm and then just shook his head. Then they left, the men escorting him on either side, sort of like kidnappers but sort of like bodyguards.”
The room is very, very quiet. Then Giovanni puts a cookie in his mouth and chews it loudly. I release two Malagueñas from the pack and give one to Reza. “And then?”
“I found him,” Kia says, nodding at Gio. “A few minutes later. And we went home. And he was never the same again.” A swirl of anger laces Kia’s words. These two have some more talking to do.
“I . . .” Giovanni falters for the first time. “I lost my mind after that. I couldn’t get rid of that image: Jeremy looking at me through that haze of pink roaches, and somehow, even though I knew I did everything I could, somehow it was my fault. Like, I felt guilty. Even though Jeremy himself held me back, I just, I replayed over and over how I could’ve stopped it anyway. I could’ve overpowered them both and Jeremy and saved him and then he would’ve come to his senses. I made up a hundred different endings to that day, and every time I did it, I sank deeper into my own pit: guilt, depression.” He’s talking to Kia more than me now, looking down at his own hands.
Kia stands with her back agains
t the wall, arms wrapped around her stomach, frown severe.
“I wanted to die,” Giovanni says. “First just a little, like, it was the answer to every guilt-drenched thought I had. Every movie of the scenario I would play in my head ended with me dying. Giving myself instead of Jeremy, or just taking my own life in some ridiculous way, in the middle of the school cafeteria or walking into the ocean and never coming back. I don’t know. I couldn’t find anything to hold on to.”
Tiny streams slide down Kia’s face. Giovanni just looks at the counter and shakes his head. “And then I just slipped away. The only way to not die at that moment was to disappear, so I did. And for a long time, I still clung to death like it was some kind of escape hatch. A lot happened . . .” He laughs and widens his eyes at his own memories. “A lot. But then I started clawing my way back out of that hole. And I started investigating. And training. A lot of martial-arts shit. Weapons. I traveled.”
I realize there’s an unlit Malagueña in my mouth. I’d been too caught up to bother with it. “Investigating what?” I ask, and then I light up and pass the lighter to Reza.
“The roach men. Blattodeons, they’re called. Jeremy is, like . . . their chosen one. There’s a long lineage of these guys, I guess, going back to the first European settlers. Each new roach master is found through a complicated ritual based on some prophecy. Jeremy fit the bill, and when they started showing up, somehow he knew, he understood on some level, even though he was terrified. And when his time came . . . he went. And I saw it.”
“Shit,” Kia whispers.
“They prey on folks, implant themselves in flesh to create these human hives, basically. The corpse becomes a nesting ground and their collective consciousness animates it. And it all goes back to the High Priest, in this case, Jeremy, who commands the whole situation and figures out how to get new bodies for them. They go for people they think won’t be looked for, of course: prostitutes, the homeless.”