by Jamel Cato
“Oh. My. Gosh. Becky, look at her claws.”
She laughed. “No really, why were you calling?”
“I need to meet with you after the ball.”
“Why?”
“To see a man about a horse.”
“Meet me at the schedule board at ten-thirty sharp.”
I called Jasmine back.
“Yes?” she asked with annoyance.
“How about this: We don’t arrive or leave together, but you spend some quality time with me when you’re not working the room. Maybe introduce me to a few people who don’t know Alonzo.”
“Much better,” she said with relief.
I felt better too because I was certain she had just frantically canceled the Dark Water operatives she would have otherwise had following me.
CHAPTER 22
I was in my penthouse condominium packing things I would need for my trips to DC and Miami. I live at the top of a luxury apartment skyscraper in downtown Philadelphia. On most days, my condo’s glass walls provided spectacular views to the horizon. But for the past two days these costly vistas had been obscured by a thick bank of milky fog that would not dissipate.
Eve called me.
“I have you on speaker because I’m packing,” I said.
“You have an unscheduled visitor at the office.”
I heard something odd in her voice.
“Dead or alive?”
“Dead.”
“Are you in danger?”
My office was protected by layers of wards and other defenses.
“I don’t think so. She looks harmless enough, but you know what they say about looks.”
“I’m on my way.”
Holly Nash, the ghost I had met outside of the Phoenix House, was standing in the reception area that led to my private office. Eve was comforting her because she seemed shaken.
“Hi,” I said. “It’s Holly, right?”
“Hi. Yes.”
“Why are you here?”
“They said you could help.”
“Who did?”
“The other ghosts. They said you were the only one who could help.”
“Help with what?”
She started sobbing. “They killed Aida.”
Twenty minutes later, I was standing in the isolated rock crevasse under the Falls Bridge where Byron had gone missing. This spot was more than just a place to conduct nefarious drug transactions. It was a local nexus of evil. In the Colonial era, mercenaries who had arrived from England with William Penn had chosen this spot to bury the bodies of the indigenous Americans who had rejected Penn’s offers to buy their land for trinkets. Their tribe’s spirits had subsequently cursed the ground. The curse shone like a beacon in the Astral spectrums, which attracted dark spirits who wanted to make use of the bones. Sixty years earlier, Parsenon had claimed dominion of the burial ground by leaving his demonic symbol marked upon the stone.
Aida DiBento’s dead body hung limply over a fallen tree trunk. It was blackened and charred like she had been roasted over an open flame. She had come here as part of her own amateur investigation into Byron’s disappearance. Holly said Aida had been burned alive by gouts of fire which had sprouted from the hands of a white woman wearing lots of black goth makeup. The flame throwing killer had been accompanied by a group of armored men carrying swords that glowed like molten iron.
I searched the ground around the body until I found the evidence I was looking for. Then I stared up at the smoking remnants of Parsenon’s dominion symbol, understanding with dread how things had changed.
“What did he offer you?” I asked Stanella Dane with an edge in my voice.
“You’re scaring me,” she said, backing into a corner of the office at the rear of her smoothie shop.
“Answer the question.”
“I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at.”
“What did Art offer you to get you to transport the Duchess of Blackshire through this gate?”
Each Gate Maven leaves uniquely identifying quantum residue on people and objects they transport. It’s how the pantheons ensure the mavens are not depriving them of tolls. Only those with my gift and the special ravens employed by the pantheons can see the residue. Most Gate Mavens are unaware of this audit trail. Stanella had been one of them until the specificity of my question forced her to realize her secret was out.
“They promised to take me home when she returns,” she said.
“MI9 will kill you on sight if you go back to the UK without a pardon.” Her Majesty’s Ministry of Otherworldly Affairs, the secret ninth ministry in the UK government, was responsible for defending the Commonwealth against supernatural threats.
“Only if they can find me.”
“Are you going to start a Knitting club and lead a quiet life in Wales? You’re a Gate Maven. Of course they can find you. They can track you from space with satellites.”
“Can they now?” she asked as her body became completely invisible to my normal and supernatural sight.
My mouth fell open. “How…”
She reappeared. “A girl has to have her secrets. You think undies are the only things we keep in our undie drawers?”
“Did the Duchess show you how to do that?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because she’s already started killing people on this side of the Pond. Don’t you know better than to make a deal with the Devil?”
“It’s a fitbird better than making a deal with the likes of you.”
“What?”
“What have you done to get me back to Newcastle but blow flowery smoke up my bum?”
“I was working on it.”
“Art worked a touch faster. And they let me go back for a day and visit my Mum.”
“I trusted you.”
“The Duchess is not here for you.”
“Who is she here for?”
“I don’t know,” Stanella lied.
I didn’t have time for jumping jacks. “I need to get to DC and looking into this has made me late. Open the gate, please.”
CHAPTER 23
I lay flat on the backseat of a car so that I could not be seen by anyone casually passing by. The car was parked in the lot of a chain convenience store in a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC.
After an eleven-minute wait, a short and scrawny white man opened the driver side door and sat behind the wheel. The twenty-nine-year-old driver put his thirty-two-ounce mug of flavored coffee in the cup holder.
I pressed a red button on a device that had intercepted the radio frequency of the car’s remote control. All four doors locked and the kill circuit engaged so that it couldn’t be started.
I sat up.
The man jumped back in surprise. “What the...”
“Hey Chad,” I said.
He yanked on the door handle and jabbed at the unlock button, but the door did not respond.
I waited, cool as a cucumber.
“I have a gun,” he said.
“Too bad it’s not with you.”
“I’m a federal agent.”
“You’re a federal contractor.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to use your access to the NSA’s Vulture surveillance system to obtain some highly sensitive data for me.”
“You’re insane.”
I pressed a button on a different device. A visible shimmer passed around the interior of the car. The device was a Cross Plane Transposition Generator. In layman terms, it created a bubble of spacetime that allowed ghosts to briefly interact with the physical world. The bubble only lasted for about thirty seconds, but that was all the time I needed.
“Rick, can you help me out?” I asked into thin air as I hit the video record on my smartphone.
The ghost of R&B singing legend Rick James materialized in the front passenger seat and smacked Chad in the face hard enough to dislodge childhood memories.
I was awestruck by the majesty of this slap, pun intended
. If slapping were an Olympic sport, it would have won the gold medal in the 4-by-slap. If slapping were a book, it would have been entitled A Treatise on Slappetry. It was a work of art and a therapist full employment act.
Chad was dazed.
Rick turned to me. “Hey man, you seen Tina?”
I said, “The last time I saw her, she was on an island by the sea with rainbow colored people.”
“Tell her I’m looking for her.”
“I will, Rick.”
“Later, brother,” he said before vanishing when the bubble dissipated.
“Why...why did you hit me?” Chad slurred.
“That was for violating my ex-wife’s privacy. If she wanted you to see her naked, she would have shown you herself.”
One of the papers Garrison Peakes had left with me listed a phone number, a ten-day temporary passcode and a note indicating I could call the phone number for data on “anyone or anything.”
When I called it, a male voice disguised by a synthesizer asked for a passcode. After I provided it, he instructed me to address him as Kronos the Data God. I asked for a list of Byron’s last ten phone calls. Instead of furnishing that information, Kronos informed me he could see my bank accounts, emails and social media activity back to my high school days. He then proceeded, without my permission, to examine the private information of people connected to me. When he got to Darlene, he’d said, “She’s a hottie. Let’s do an image search for nipples...Whoa! Jackpot!” He eventually gave me the call list, but his callous abuse of power, and the fact that such a privacy-invading power existed, got under my skin. I asked a talented hacker I know if she were up for a challenge and a huge pay day. A week later I had Chad’s real name.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m on a tight schedule, Chad. I don’t have time to play games. What you’re going to do is find out where Serenity Blakemore’s portion of the royalties for the Carghill Bees really goes. I want names, dates, amounts and bank accounts.”
His eyes went wide. “She’s a presidential candidate on file with the FEC. That would be illegal. And they audit access to her records like a hawk.”
“You know what they don’t audit like a hawk? The logs of contractors who misuse Vulture to do nipple searches. I’ve seen those logs and they show that you’ve seen the nipples of some very important and powerful women. What do you think will happen to you if those women and the NSA’s inspector general were made aware of that?”
“I don’t believe you. No one can access those logs but the NSA higher-ups and the counter intel guys.”
I pulled up a file on my phone and started reading off log entries.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll see what I can find.”
“You better do more than see or your mother will be visiting you in prison. And you know her bad foot will make that a burden.”
“Give me a week.”
I help up my smartphone and played a slow-motion video of The Slap. “If I don’t have the data by midnight tonight, this is going on the first page of YouTube and the logs are going to the OIG.”
He winced at the fine detail of the high-definition recording. “How can I get the data to you?”
CHAPTER 24
My next encounter in the Blakemore case did not involve anything supernatural, but it was the one that had the deepest impact on me.
Despite what I had told Jasmine, I did not have a tuxedo for the ball. Luckily, Eve found a tailor in Silver Spring who claimed he could do same-day fittings.
A diminutive Polish American man named Joe Wisnewski in his sixties met me at the front counter of Black Tie Express to collect his exorbitant, upfront tailoring fee.
“This is quite the racket you have here,” I said as I handed over my credit card.
He smiled. “Would you like to cancel?”
“No.”
“Headed to the Union Station Ball are we?”
“What gave me away?”
“Every customer who’s been in here before you today. People making eleventh-hour decisions to attend the USB pays for my vacation house in Ocean City.”
“At these prices, you could probably buy the beach too.”
“Half the fee is for the fitting, the other half is for the marital counseling.”
“Did I walk into the wrong store?”
“Virtually all of my customers come here after reconsidering an earlier decision not to attend an event that is important to their wives. In most cases, the root problem is not the event, but the relationship.”
“And you help them with that?”
“I read between the lines while I’m measuring hemlines. If a man is here, he doesn’t really want a divorce. I help them see that.”
“Ashamed I didn’t meet you before I got divorced.”
“Is your date for the ball someone who has given you new perspectives on the world or yourself?”
“She is.”
“Then focus your energy on that.”
I was looking at my reflection in a three-sided mirror while one of Joe’s assistant tailors made chalk marks on my tuxedo jacket. An African American man in his early forties emerged from a fitting room and came to stand before the mirror next to mine. Joe was following behind him with measuring tape wrapped around his neck.
“This looks outstanding, Mr. Perry,” the tiny tailor said. “Jasmine will love the way you look in this.”
I whipped my head in their direction.
The customer was about six feet tall with a medium, athletic build. He didn’t look thrilled to be there.
I listened in on their conversation, which vacillated between sartorial and marital matters.
When Joe and my tailor walked away, I said, “Hey Bruh, I don’t mean to ear hustle, but did Little Joe just say your last name is Perry and you’re married to Jasmine?”
He turned to me with a wary look. “He did. Let me guess: You work on the Hill and you know Jas?”
“The only bill I give a damn about somebody co-sponsoring is my light bill. But you just described my wife. She swims with the sharks and has definitely called your wife for a life preserver a few times.”
He chuckled and extended his hand for a shake. “Alonzo.”
I shook it and said, “Lionel.”
Black Tie Express only guaranteed a same-day turnaround if customers remained in the store for the entire fitting process, which could take up to three hours. I spent most of that time in a waiting room sitting next to Alonzo. We hit it off, discovering many shared views on sports, politics and how being a black man in America was often akin to walking barefoot over broken glass.
We discussed our dashed dreams, his of becoming a fulltime jazz saxophonist and mine of flying into space.
Jasmine came up. He said many of their marital problems orbited his recent decision to take a sabbatical from his partner-track position at an elite law firm to spend a year playing his horn.
“My frat brother told me to come to NYC and make his jazz trio a quartet.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“Have you ever seen Jas?”
“You’re a lucky man, Bruh.”
“If I’m being real, I’m afraid another brother might take my place while I’m gone.”
“Is that why you decided to go to the ball tonight?”
“Yes, even though I think they should call it a masquerade party instead of a charity ball.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it’s so fake and pretentious. Half the time, Jas will introduce me to someone like they’re the best thing since sliced bread and then as soon as they walk away, she’ll be like, ‘I hate her.’ And there are all these unspoken etiquette rules about who can talk to whom. I’m the type of brother who judges people based on who they are, not whether they own or rent their vacation house in Oaks Bluff.”
“But you’re showing up for Jas?”
“I love that girl like a fat kid loves cake.”
�
��What did Little Joe say about the situation?”
“He said I should find common ground where both our passions can thrive. When I asked him what that means, he told me to imagine how happy we would be if I had a part-time law practice that allowed her to brag about me at work and play gigs from Thursday to Sunday.”
“That sounds like the move.”
“If I had the contacts to do that, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking.”
“You know why I’m going to the ball?”
“What’s the 411?”
“To help out my ex’s new man.”
“What? That’s out of order! I wouldn’t do a damn thing but give the gas face to another cat I knew for a fact had seen my lady naked.”
I was quiet.
He looked over. “I’m not judging you, Bruh.”
“It’s all good. I pretty much felt the same way as you until somebody told me that true class is respecting the dignity in everyone, even people you think don’t deserve your respect. And you know we’d rather be classy than ashy.”
“That’s some Kendrick Lamar deepness right there.”
“I know, right. The crazy part is that he’s actually a cool dude. I mean, if I met that brother under different circumstances, we might even be homies.”
When Joe handed me the garment bag containing my newly tailored tuxedo, he asked, “Are you going to continue seeing Jasmine?”
I looked down at him in shock.
He said, “I have been doing this for a very long time and there are only so many black-tie events in the Beltway. This is not the first time a husband and a suitor have visited my shop at the same time. I intervene when the situation is dangerous or unhealthy, but after doing a bit of—what did you call it—ear hustling, I realized that wasn’t the case here.”
“If I see her again, it will be strictly business.”
“Good man.”
“Do you accept tips?”
“Of course,” he said, handing me a credit card terminal.
I paid him an additional thousand dollars.