Moonlight & Vines (46 page)

“There was a little girl with cancer,” he said. “She would have died later tonight. Her name—”

“I don't want to know her name,” Mona told him. “I just want to know, will she be all right?”

He nodded.

I could have had anything, she found herself thinking.

“Do you regret giving the gift away,” Nacky asked her.

She shook her head. “No. I only wish I had more of them.” She eyed him for a long moment. “I don't suppose I could freely give you another couple of dollars . . . ?”

“No. It doesn't—”

“Work that way,” she finished. “I kind of figured as much.” She knelt down so that she wasn't towering over him. “So now what? Where will you go?”

“I have a question for you,” he said.

“Shoot.”

“If I asked, would you let me stay on with you?”

Mona laughed.

“I'm serious,” he told her.

“And what? Things would be different now, or would you still be snarly more often than not?”

He shook his head. “No different.”

“You know I can't afford to keep that apartment,” she said. “I'm probably going to have to get a bachelor somewhere.”

“I wouldn't mind.”

Mona knew she'd be insane to agree. All she'd been doing for the past week was trying to get him out of her life. But then she thought of the look in his eyes when he'd come back from the hospital and knew that he wasn't all bad. Maybe he was a little magic man, but he was still stuck living on the street and how happy could that make a person? Could be, all he needed was what everybody needed—a fair break. Could be, if he was treated fairly, he wouldn't glower so much, or be so bad-tempered.

But could she put up with it?

“I can't believe I'm saying this,” she told him, “but, yeah. You can come back with me.”

She'd never seen him smile before, she realized. It transformed his features.

“You've broken the curse,” he said.

“Say what?”

“You don't know how long I've had to wait to find someone both selfless and willing to take me in as I was.”

“I don't know about the selfless—”

He leaned forward and kissed her.

“Thank you,” he said.

And then he went whirling off across the lawn, spinning like a dervishing top. His squatness melted from him and he grew tall and lean, fluid as a willow sapling, dancing in the wind. From the far side of the lawn he waved at her. For a long moment, all she could do was stare, open-mouthed. When she finally lifted her hand to wave back, he winked out of existence, like a spark leaping from a fire, glowing brightly before it vanished into the darkness.

This time she knew he was gone for good.

“M
Y
L
IFE AS A
B
IRD
”
M
ONA'S CLOSING MONOLOGUE FROM CHAPTER ELEVEN:

The weird thing is I actually miss him. Oh, not his crankiness, or his serious lack of personal hygiene. What I miss is the kindness that occasionally slipped through—the piece of him that survived the curse.

Jilly says that was why he was so bad-tempered and gross. He had to make himself unlikeable, or it wouldn't have been so hard to find someone who would accept him for who he seemed to be. She says I stumbled into a fairy tale, which is pretty cool when you think about it, because how many people can say that?

Though I suppose if this really were a fairy tale, there'd be some kind of “happily ever after” wrap up, or I'd at least have come away with a fairy gift of one sort or another. That invisibility charm, say, or the ability to change into a bird or a cat.

But I don't really need anything like that.

I've got
The Girl Zone
. I can be anything I want in its
pages. Rockit Grrl, saving the day. Jupiter, who can't seem to physically show up in her own life. Or just me.

I've got my dreams. I had a fun one last night. I was walking downtown and I was a birdwoman, spindly legs, beak where my nose should be, long wings hanging down from my shoulders like a ragged cloak. Or maybe I was just wearing a bird costume. Nobody recognized me, but they knew me all the same and thought it was way cool.

And I've touched a piece of real magic. Now, no matter how grey and bland and pointless the world might seem sometimes, I just have to remember that there really is more to everything than what we can see. Everything has a spirit that's so much bigger and brighter than you think it could hold.

Everything has one.

Me, too.

In theory there is free will, in practice everything is predetermined.

—Ramakrishna, nineteenth-century Bengali saint

The crows won't shut up. It's late, close on midnight. The junkyard's more shadow than substance and the city's asleep. The crows should be sleeping, too—roosting somewhere, doing whatever it is that crows do at night. Because you don't normally see them like this, cawing at each other, hoarse voices tearing raggedly across the yard, the birds shifting, restless on their perches, flecks of rust falling in small red clouds every time they move.

They can't sleep and they won't shut up.

Coe can't sleep either, but at least he's got an excuse.

The dead don't sleep.

He's sitting there on the hood of a junked car, three nights dead. Watching the flames lick up above the rim of an old steel barrel where he's got a trash fire burning. Waiting for China to show up. China with her weird tribal tags: the white mud dried on her face, eyes darkened with rings of soot, lips blackened with charcoal, cheeks marked with black hieroglyphic lines. He looks about the same. The two of them are like matched bookends in a chiaroscuro still life. Like they just stepped out of some old black and white movie, except for that red dress of hers.

He's not exactly looking forward to seeing her. First thing you know,
she'll start in again on who they're supposed to kill and why, and he's no more interested in listening to her tonight than he was the day he came back.

He thinks of standing by the barrel, holding his hands up to the flames for warmth, but that's a comfort he's never going to know again. The cold's lodged too deep inside him and it's never going away, doesn't matter what China says.

Killing's not the answer. But neither's this.

“Just shut up,” he tells the birds.

They don't listen to him any more than they ever do, but China comes walking out of the shadows like his voice summoned her.

“Hey, Leon,” she says.

She jumps lightly up onto the hood of the car, stretches out her legs, leans back against the windshield. Her dress rides up her legs, but the sight of it doesn't do anything for him. She's too young. Hell, she could be his daughter.

Coe gives her a nod, waits for her to start in on him. She surprises him. She just sits there, quiet for a change, checking out the birds.

“What do you think they're talking about?” she asks after awhile.

“You don't know?”

Ever since they came back, it's like she knows everything. Maybe she was like that before they died. He doesn't know. First time he saw her she was in that tight red dress, running down a narrow alleyway, black combat boots clumping on the pavement. Came bursting out of the alley and ran right into him where he was just walking along, minding his own business. They fall in a tumble, and before they can get themselves untangled, there's a couple of Oriental guys there, standing over them. One's got a shotgun, the other a Uzi. For a moment, Coe thinks he's back in the jungle.

He doesn't get a chance to say a word.

The last thing he sees are the muzzles of their guns, flashing white. Last thing he hears is the sound of the shots. Last thing he feels are the bullets tearing into him. When he comes back, he's lying in a junkyard—this junkyard—and China's bending over him, wiping wet clay on his face. He starts to push her away, but she shakes her head.

“This is the way it's got to be,” she says.

He doesn't know what she's talking about then. Now that he does, he wishes he didn't. He looks at her, lounging on the car, and wonders, was
she always so bloodthirsty, or did dying bring it out in her? Dying didn't bring it out in him and it wouldn't have had to dig far to find the capacity for violence in his soul.

She sits up, pulls her knees to her chin, gazes over them to where he's sitting on the hood.

“Look,” she tells him, her voice almost apologetic. “I didn't choose for things to work out the way they did.”

He doesn't reply. There's nothing to say.

“You never asked why those guys were chasing me,” she says.

Coe shrugs.

“Don't you want to know why you died?”

“I know why I died,” he says. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, end of story.”

China shakes her head. “It's way more complicated than that.”

It usually is, Coe thinks.

“You know anything about how the Tongs run their prostitution rings?” she goes on.

Coe nods. It's an old story. The recruiters find their victims in Southeast Asia, “loaning” the girls the money they need to buy passage to North America, then make them work off the debt in brothels over here. The fact that none of their victims ever pays off that debt doesn't seem to stop the new girls from buying into it. There's always fresh blood. Some of those girls are so young they've barely hit puberty. The older ones—late teens, early twenties—make out like they're preteens, because that's where the big money is.

He gives China a considering look. Her name accentuates the Chinese cast to her features. Dark eyes the shape of almonds, black hair worn in a classic pageboy, bangs in front, the rest a sleek shoulder-length curve. He'd thought she was sixteen, seventeen. Now he's not so sure anymore.

“That what happened to you?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “I never knew a thing about it until I ran into one of their girls. According to a card she was carrying, she was the property of the Blue Circle Boys Triad—at least the card had their chop on it. She was on the run and I took her in.”

“And the Tong found out.”

She shakes her head again. “She could barely speak a word of English, but a woman in the Thai grocery under my apartment was able to translate for us. That's how I heard about what they're doing to these girls.”

There's a look in her eyes that Coe hasn't seen there before, but he recognizes it. It's like an old pain that won't go away. He knows all about old pain.

“So what put the Tong onto you?” he asks, curious in spite of himself.

“I turned them in.”

Coe thinks he didn't hear her right. “You what?”

“I turned them in. The cops raided their brothel and busted a couple of dozen of them. Don't you read the papers?”

Coe shook his head. “I don't—didn't—need more bad news in my life.”

“Yeah, well. I've been there.”

Coe's still working his head around what she did. Blowing the whistle on the Blue Circle Boys. She had to have known there'd be cops in their pocket, happy to let them know who was responsible. It was probably only dumb luck that the cop she'd taken her story to was a family man, walking the straight and narrow.

“And you didn't think the Tong'd find out?' he asks.

“I didn't care,” she says. She's quiet for a long moment, then adds, “I didn't think I cared. Dying kind of changes your perspective on this kind of thing.”

Coe nods. “Yeah. Dying brings all kinds of changes.”

“So I was out clubbing—the night they were chasing me. Feeling righteous about what I'd done. Celebrating, I guess. I was heading for home, trying to flag down a cab, when they showed up. I didn't know what to do, so I just took off and ran.”

“And we know how well that turned out,” Coe says.

“It wasn't like I was trying to get you killed. I liked being alive myself.”

Coe shrugs. “I'm not blaming you. It's like I said. I was just in the wrong place.”

“But our dying still means something. Doesn't matter if there's crooked cops, or that they rolled me over to the Tong. The brothel still got shut down and the Blue Circle Boys are hurting bad. And now those girls have a chance at a better life.”

“Sure. They're going to do really well once they're deported back to Thailand or Singapore or wherever they originally came from.”

Anger flares in her eyes. “What are you saying?”

“That nothing's changed. The Tong's had a bit of a setback, but give it
a month or two and everything'll be back to business as usual. That's the way it works.”

“No,” she says. “This means something. Just like what we've got to do now means something.”

Coe shakes his head again. “Some things you can't change. It's like the government. The most you can do is vote in another set of monkeys, but it doesn't change anything. It's always business as usual.”

“Have you always been such a chickenshit?”

“I'm a pacifist. I don't believe violence solves anything.”

“Same difference.”

Coe looks at her. He's guessing now that she's maybe twenty, twenty-two. At least half his age. When he was younger than she is now, the government gave him a gun and taught him how to kill. He was good at it, too. Did two tours, in country, came back all in one piece and with no other skills. So they hired him on. Same work, different jungle. There was always work for a guy like him who was good at what he did, good at doing what he was told. Good at keeping his mouth shut.

Until the day an op went bad and a little girl got caught in the crossfire. After that he couldn't do it anymore. He looked at that dead kid and all he could do was put the gun down and disappear. Stopped living like a king, the best hotels, the best restaurants, limos when he wanted them, working only nine, ten times a year. He retired from it all, just like that. Vanished into the underground world of the homeless where he was just one more skell, nobody a citizen'd give a second look.