Scarlett Undercover

by Jennifer Latham

  The street outside Calamus was empty except for the rag guy. The dog was gone. There were no tails or bogeymen waiting for me in the fading evening light. I tucked a clump of curls back into my tam, took my blackjack out of my bag, and slid it up my right sleeve. Its smooth wood was cold comfort against my skin.

  The bus stop was a block past the rag man, and on the same side of the street. If I crossed the road, he’d know I was trying to avoid him, and I’d just have to cross back anyway. Besides, I knew how to defend myself. Don’t move, creep, I thought. Don’t freakin’ move.

  I started toward him at a steady clip. The figure’s sway didn’t change. As the distance between us shrank, I could make out a long, dingy scarf wrapped around his neck and up over his nose. A brimmed hat with earflaps covered his brow. His gloves were filthy. Not an inch of flesh was visible. My hand tightened around the blackjack.

  At first, the sound coming out of him was so quiet I assumed he was telling himself a tale. But the closer I got, the more it took on a musical drone. The rag man was singing.

  Little fingers of caution skittered up my spine.

  I kept walking.

  The sound changed.

  “Stay away,” he hissed, dragging his S through the rest of the phrase like a dying man’s last breath. “Stay away.…”

  I gave the blackjack another squeeze, kept my feet moving, and didn’t stop until I’d reached the broken-down bus kiosk.

  From the corner of my eye, I could see the rag man, still swaying. I knew he wasn’t going to come after me, knew it in my bones. Still, it wasn’t until I heard the whine of a bus engine that my grip on the blackjack loosened and my heart eased down out of my throat.

  “Gettin’ dark,” the fleshy driver said when I climbed aboard. She glanced up into her rearview mirror at the empty bus. “Glad to have your company.”

  “Amen to that,” I said, and settled into the seat behind her.

  7

  The General was curled up under an old mover’s blanket in the alley next to my building, squinting at a tattered copy of the Las Almas Globe.

  “Whatcha reading, General?” I asked.

  “Stories,” he said with a toothless grin. “Nothin’ but stories.”

  I fished a five out of my pocket and gave it to him. He rubbed the bill between his fingers and sniffed it. I didn’t ask why.

  “You’re a peach, m’dear,” he said, squirreling the money away under his shirt. “A right peach.” I told him good night. He was already back to his newspaper, too distracted to reply.

  Inside, our apartment was pitch black and cold as a coffin. Reem had graduated from med school two years earlier and was doing her residency at the roughest hospital in Las Almas. I didn’t see much of my sister. I missed her.

  I flipped on the overhead light, slipped off my shoes before I stepped through the door, and carried my bag of groceries to the kitchen. It was as basic as they come: refrigerator, stove, sink, table, chairs. There was a toaster, too, along with an old-fashioned coffee percolator and an antique boom box that played cassettes. Ugly brown flowers crisscrossed the yellow wallpaper. I noticed a corner of it peeling up, so I put the groceries away, took a little tube of glue from the cabinet by the sink, and tacked the corner down. Then I slogged back to the living room, grabbed Abbi’s fake bottle from the curio cabinet, and flopped onto the couch.

  Things were getting intense, and it had me thrown. For the most part, detective work was boring. Uncomplicated. I tracked down lost and stolen things, found people who didn’t want to be found, and figured out who was cheating on whom.

  Gemma Archer’s case was different.

  For one thing, Blondie and Shorty had started tailing me just an hour or so after I’d met Oliver. For another, there was the knot—the one Oliver had a bad case of the obsessions over, the one inked onto Decker’s perfect chest, the one stamped into the lids of Abbi’s bottles. It was enough to convince me Gemma was probably right about Quinn Johnson’s death not being a simple case of teenage angst run amok.

  I ran my finger over the words etched into the bottle and tried to pull its lid off for the millionth time. No dice.

  The bottle itself was small and dense and cool in my hand, an exact replica of the priceless one Abbi had tucked away in the safe deposit box. I traced the Syriac letters etched into it, wondered how a visit from a scared little girl could have stirred up so much so fast. The whole thing gave me an aspirin-proof headache that wasn’t going to go anywhere unless I made some progress on the case.

  Problem was, there were too many angles to cover all at once. I set the bottle on the glass-topped coffee table. Got up. Paced. When that didn’t help, I went to the kitchen and played one of the plastic cassettes of Arabic music that Ummi had loved so much. Our imam here in Las Almas said music was haraam, but Ummi came from a long line of Sudanese Muslim musicians with songs in their blood.

  I thought of her standing in front of her creaky old blue-and-white ironing board, head bouncing to the music’s nasal singing and tambourine beat as she forced wrinkles out of everything from headscarves to socks. She always took off her hijab before she worked, letting her long, graying curls hang down her back. Unlike mine, her curls were smooth and beautiful. Abbi would always touch them as he walked past, smiling a smile meant only for her.

  And I pictured Abbi, sitting at the table, reading aloud to us from his beloved old copy of One Thousand and One Nights. My favorite story was about Sheherazade, how she kept her husband, King Shahryar, from beheading her on their wedding night and for a thousand nights after that by telling tales so wonderful he couldn’t bear not knowing how they ended. Outside of Ummi, Reem, and me, stories had been the only thing that brought my abbi joy.

  I closed my eyes and pressed against them with the heels of my hands. Heard Abbi’s warm voice bringing jinn, princes, magic fish, and monkeys to life. “Sheherazade refused to let anyone write her story for her,” he’d told me one cold Sunday morning as Ummi’s steam iron hissed. “And you must do the same.”

  Then I heard the General’s voice in my head. Stories… Nothin’ but stories.

  “Maybe,” I whispered to the dark. “But stories get told for a reason.”

  I grabbed my laptop from the counter and sat down at the kitchen table.

  “Talk to me,” I said as the Globe’s front page loaded. “Tell me something new.”

  That day’s paper had nothing good to say. The city of Las Almas was broke. Fifty police officers and firefighters had been laid off. A tsunami had washed a small island country out to sea. So I pulled up the archived story about Quinn Johnson’s suicide, and this time I didn’t skim.

  Local Teen’s Death Ruled a Suicide

  LAS ALMAS–According to witnesses, fifteen-year-old Quinlan Johnson jumped to his death from the Baker Street Bridge late Friday afternoon. Construction barriers for ongoing renovations blocked motorists’ view of the situation as it unfolded, but pedestrians on the walkway witnessed the tragedy. Jogger Robert Goncalves saw Johnson sitting on the external guardrail, throwing what appeared to be scraps of paper into the water. “I tried to get to him,” Goncalves said in a statement to the media. “I just wasn’t fast enough.”

  According to Goncalves, an unidentified woman reached Johnson before he fell. “He told her something I couldn’t hear,” Goncalves said. “Right after that, she grabbed his arm, and then he jumped. She couldn’t hold on.”

  Police declined to identify the unnamed witness.

  Quinlan Johnson was the son of Archer Construction senior vice president Bradford Johnson and cardiologist Caroline Whittaker-Johnson. He is survived by his parents and an eleven-year-old brother, Samuel.

  I reread the last paragraph. Twice.

  Quinn’s father worked for Archer Construction. Oliver’s father, Arthur, had founded Archer Construction. It wasn’t much, but it was a loose thread worth tugging. I plugged the company’s name into the newspaper’s search window. So many articles came up I had to jump back ei
ght screens to get to the first, about a young business with a spanking-new contract to renovate an old hotel lobby. From there the articles ran longer, the projects grew, and the price tags got downright obscene. There were business profiles of Gemma’s dad, society shots of her mom all dolled up and smiling at charity galas. Small building projects gave way to big ones. Then came stadiums. Skyscrapers. The newer the article, the more massive the project. And everything seemed to run smooth as fresh-shaved legs, right up until Fagin Inc. hired Archer Construction to build The Parker.

  The Parker was going to be the biggest thing the world had ever seen—taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, sleeker than the Shanghai World Financial Center, greener than 30 St Mary Axe in London. It would house offices leased on the cheap to charities and not-for-profits, a mall full of fair trade stores run by at-risk teens, and subsidized apartments for families with foster kids. The whole thing sounded too good to be true. And maybe it was.

  From the beginning, work on The Parker had been held up by permit battles, labor disputes, hijacked supply shipments, and equipment sabotage. Vandals broke into Archer’s on-site trailer four different times. The mayor himself was overheard telling his assistant the whole thing was jinxed. Still, one of the last articles posted before Quinn Johnson’s death included a quote, issued through lawyers, by Fagin Inc.’s “elusive and as-yet-unphotographed” founder, George Fagin. “The Parker is the very embodiment of our company’s commitment to fostering dignity, independence, and economic security for all,” he’d said. “Nothing will prevent its completion.”

  A sketch under the quote showed what the finished building would look like. I clicked it into full screen, took a sharp breath when I realized what I was looking at.

  Two towers spiraled up like Jack’s own beanstalks, united at the base by twenty glassed-in floors. Above that, they rose, separate but side by side, to a series of interwoven skybridges near the top. The skybridges hovered in space, twisting into an infinite, impossible version of Solomon’s knot that linked the towers just before they touched the clouds.

  Ummi’s cassette ran out. Clicked off.

  The apartment went quiet.

  And then a knock loud as gunfire came from the front door, sending me nearly out of my skin.

  I gave the picture one last look and went to the door. Ummi had painted over its peephole long ago, after the cancer metastasized to her brain and made her paranoid about people in the hall looking in. Reem and I hadn’t had the heart to scrape it off.

  “Who is it?” I said.

  “Ees Meester Prazsky. Your seester say commode not flush right. I come to feex.”

  I undid the two chain locks and threw the dead bolt. Our super, Mr. Prazsky, was as hard to pin down as a soft-boiled egg, and when he came to your door, you didn’t let him get away. Not even if you were in the middle of busting a hole the size of Cincinnati in your case.

  “You’re working late tonight, aren’t you, Mr. P?” I said as the door swung open.

  “Indeed,” came the voice. Only this time there was no accent. And no Mr. Prazsky, either.

  8

  I slammed all my weight against the door. It stopped short of the latch and flew open, sending me sprawling onto the floor. Air shot out of my lungs. Pain streaked through my left wrist. By the time I got to my feet, the stranger was in our apartment, door closed behind him.

  He was tall, with dark hair, broad shoulders, and knife-edge cheekbones. In less dire circumstances, I might have called him handsome. As it was, I called him a threat.

  “As-salaamu alaikum,” he said.

  There was no way in hell I was going to wish him peace in return.

  “I don’t know who you are,” I said, “but I want you gone.”

  “I’m sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry at all. “I would not have had you fall. For that, I apologize.”

  He moved closer. I moved back.

  “What did you do to Mr. Prazsky?” I said.

  “Not a thing. Though we did have a brief conversation about an empty apartment on the seventh floor. Fascinating people, Ukrainians. Lovely accents.”

  “Look,” I said, working hard to sound pissed off instead of scared. “I’ve had a long day. Tell me what you want so we can wrap this up fast.”

  He looked unimpressed.

  “My name is Asim,” he said. “I work with Manny.”

  “Manny?”

  “The gentleman you just visited.”

  “The tattoo guy?”

  “The tattoo guy.”

  “Well.” I leaned against the arm of the love seat behind me and hugged my throbbing wrist to my chest. “Ain’t that a helluva thing.”

  “May I sit?” Asim asked.

  “No.”

  That earned me the kind of scowl a man can only pull off if he’s used to being obeyed.

  “Look,” I said, “judging by your greeting, you’re Muslim, right?”

  He nodded. Barely.

  “Then you know I can’t be alone with you. You’re a man. We’re not related. It’s haraam.”

  He smiled. Not cruelly, not dangerously, but with a grim intensity that didn’t sit right.

  “From what I’ve seen,” he said, “you have very little regard for either your faith or your obligations as a proper young Muslim woman.”

  He had me dead to rights on that one. I only wished I knew exactly what he’d seen—and how.

  “Tell me why you’re here,” I said. “Or did you want to play twenty questions instead?”

  He studied me like a little boy deciding whether or not to pull the legs off a spider.

  “I’m here to extend an invitation,” Asim said. “Manny requests the pleasure of your company on Monday afternoon at Calamus. One o’clock.”

  “I was just there,” I said. “He didn’t seem too keen on conversation.”

  “You found us sooner than we expected. Manny wasn’t ready.”

  “Expected?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why the hell would he be expecting me?”

  Asim stared at me with the same disapproving look I got from grumpy old-timers at the mosque.

  “You are disrespectful and profane,” he said. “Even so, there is much of your father in you.”

  That knocked me back a few pegs.

  “You knew Abbi?”

  “You can discuss that on Monday. With Manny.”

  “No,” I said, getting all kinds of angry. “You’re going to tell me what you know about my father. Now.”

  He ignored me and looked around the room. Patronizing people sucked. Dismissive people were worse.

  I stood up. “Tell. Me. What. You. Know.”

  His eyes settled on the bottle replica I’d left on the coffee table.

  “Don’t touch it.” I tensed like a missile ready to launch.

  A smile flickered across his lips. He picked the bottle up, turned it over and around in his hand.

  “We remain unvanquished,” he said softly.

  “Put it down!”

  He turned toward me in a kind of daze, like he’d forgotten I was there.

  “The Shubaak must be safeguarded,” he said. “I’m taking it with me.”

  “The hell you are!” I charged him. He blocked me with one hand, lifted the bottle beyond my reach with the other.

  “You’re a bully!” I shouted. “And a thief!”

  He bent his head toward me, so close I couldn’t help looking into his eyes. The gold rings I saw there were a sucker punch to the gut.

  “I am a warrior.”

  He went to the door.

  “Monday. One o’clock.”

  The door clicked closed.

  I collapsed onto the couch, and let the dead bolt be.

  Decker answered on the first ring.

  “Hey.” He sounded relieved and worried all at once.

  “Tell me what’s going on, Deck.”

  I was numb. Hollowed out by fear. Shaky from the slow tide of adrenaline leaving my veins.

&n
bsp; “Deck?”

  “Did you go to Calamus?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing.” I sank back into the couch cushions. My wrist throbbed. My mouth was dry. My eyes were on the door Asim had closed ten minutes earlier.

  “I shouldn’t have let you go alone.” His words tumbled out all at once. “I should have taken you myself. It’s just…”

  “Let me?” I said, grateful for the sudden prickle of anger. “Since when do you let me do anything?”

  Silence.

  “Tell me what’s happening, Deck.”

  “Nothing. I’m concerned about you is all.”

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose with my good hand. Told him he was lying.

  The tension on the line was thick enough to chew.

  “Why won’t you talk to me, Deck?”

  “They won’t…” He hesitated.

  “They?”

  He cleared his throat. “Listen, Scarlett, can I come over?”

  I wanted him there, wanted to press my back against his chest, feel his arms wrap around me tight enough to make the world go away.

  I made my voice harsh to hide the longing behind it.

  “Can you explain why someone named Asim just broke into our apartment and walked off with one of the only things Reem and I had left to remind us of Abbi?”

  “I… I need to see you, Scarlett.” His voice broke in the middle of my name.

  “Stay home, Deck. It’s late.”

  I reached into my jeans pocket, took out the scraps of crayon wrapper from Gemma’s apartment.

  “You know I’d tell you everything if I could,” he said.

  “You would?”

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “I would. You’re important to me, Scarlett.”

  “I know.”

  “Good.”

  I let the strips of paper flutter to the coffee table.