Newford Stories (16 page)

A few blocks farther, Hank pulled the cab
over to the curb. He keyed the speed-dial on the cell phone and had
to wait through a handful of rings before he got a connection.

"You never get tired of that crap, kid?"
Moth asked.

Hank turned the tape deck down.

"All I've got left is that six o'clock
pickup," he said by way of response. The only thing Moth considered
music had to have a serious twang—add in yodeling and it was even
better—so there was no point in arguing with him. "Have you got
anything to fill in the next couple of hours?"

"A big nada."

Hank nodded. He hated slow nights, but he
especially hated them when he was trying to raise some cash.

"Okay," he said. "Guess I'll head over to
the club and just wait for Eddie outside."

"Yeah, well, keep your doors locked. I hear
those guys that were jacking cars downtown have moved up to
Foxville the past couple of nights."

"Eddie told me."

"Did he say anything about his people
dealing with it?"

Hank watched as a drunk stumbled over to the
doorway of one of the closed clubs and started to take a leak.

"Like he's going to tell me?" he said.

"You got a point. Hey, I hear that kid you
like's doing a late set at the Rhatigan."

Hank almost laughed. Under a spotlight,
Brandon Cole seemed ageless, especially when he played. Hank put
him in his mid—to late-thirties, but he had the kind of build and
features that could easily go ten years in either direction. A
tall, handsome black man, he seemed to live only for his sax and
his music. He was no kid, but to Moth anybody under sixty was a
kid.

"What time's it start?" he asked.

He could almost see Moth shrug. "What am I,
a press secretary now? All I know is Dayson's got a couple of high
rollers in town—jazz freaks like you, kid—and he told me he's
taking them by."

"Thanks," Hank said. "Maybe I'll check it
out."

He cut the connection and started to work
his way across town to where the Rhatigan was nestled on the edge
of the Combat Zone. The after-hours bar where Eddie ran his
all-night poker games was over in Upper Foxville, but he figured he
could take in an hour or so of Cole's music and still make the
pickup in plenty of time.

Except it didn't work out that way. He was
coming down one of the little dark back streets that ran off
Grasso—no more than an alley, really—when his headlights picked out
a tall man in a dove-gray suit, beating on some woman.

Hank knew the drill. The first few times he
took out the spare car, Moth had stopped him at the junkyard gate
and stuck his head in the window to reel it off: "Here's the way it
plays, kid. You only stop for money. You don't pick up strays. You
never get involved." One, two, three.

But some things you didn't walk away from.
This time of night, in this part of town, she was probably a
hooker—having some altercation with her pimp, maybe, or she hadn't
been paying attention to her radar and got caught up with a john
turned ugly—but that still didn't make it right.

He hit the brakes, the Chev skidding for a
moment on the slick pavement before he got it back under control.
The baseball bat on the seat beside him began to roll forward. A
surge of adrenaline put him into motion, quick, not even thinking.
He grabbed the bat by its handle, put the car in neutral, foot
coming down on the parking brake and locking it into place. Through
the windshield he could see the man backhand the woman, turn to
face him. As the woman fell to the pavement, Hank popped the door
and stepped outside. The baseball bat was a comfortable weight in
his hand until the man reached under his jacket.

Hank could almost hear Moth's voice in the
back of his head. "You get involved, you get hurt. Plain and
simple. And let me tell you, kid. There's no percentage in getting
hurt."

It was a little late for advice now.

The man wasn't interested in discussion. He
pulled a handgun out from under that tailored suit jacket and
fired, all in one smooth move. Hank saw the muzzle flash, then
something smashed him in the shoulder and spun him around, throwing
him against the door of the Chev. The baseball bat dropped out of
numbed fingers and went clattering across the pavement. He followed
after it, sliding down the side of the Chev and leaving a smear of
blood on the cab's paint job.

Moth is going to be pissed about that, he
thought.

Then the pain hit him and he blacked out for
a moment. He floated in some empty space where only the pain and
sound existed. His own rasping breath. The soft murmur of the cab's
engine, idling. The faint sound of Miles and Shorter, the last cut
on the tape, just ending. The muted scuff of leather-soled shoes on
pavement, approaching. When he got his eyes back open, the man was
standing over him, looking down.

The man had a flat, dead gaze, eyes as gray
as his suit. Hank had seen their kind before. They were the eyes of
the men who stood against the wall in the back room of Eddie's bar,
watching the action, waiting for Eddie to give them a sign that
somebody needed straightening out. They were the eyes of men he'd
picked up at the airport and dropped off at some nondescript hotel
after a stop at one of the local gunrunners. They were the eyes
he'd seen in a feral dog's face one night when it had killed Emma's
cat in the yard out behind her apartment, the hard gaze holding his
for a long moment before it retreated with its kill.

The man lifted his gun again and now Hank
could see it was an automatic, as anonymous as the killer holding
it. Behind the weapon, the man's face remained expressionless.
There was nothing there. No anger, no pleasure, no regret.

Hank couldn't feel the pain in his shoulder
anymore. His mind had gone blank, except for one thing. His entire
being seemed to hold its breath and focus on the muzzle of the
automatic, waiting for another flash, more pain. But they didn't
come.

The man turned away from him, cobra-quick,
his weapon now aimed at something on the roof of the cab. It hadn't
registered until the man moved, but now Hank realized he'd also
heard what had distracted the killer. An unexpected sound. A hollow
bang on metal as though someone had jumped onto the roof of the
cab.

Jumped from where? His own gaze followed
that of his attacker. One of the fire escapes, he supposed. He knew
a momentary sense of relief—someone else was playing Good Samaritan
tonight—except there was only a girl standing there on the roof of
the cab. A kid. Skinny and monochrome and not much to her: raggedy
blue-black hair, dark complexion, black clothes and combat boots.
There seemed to be a cape fluttering up behind her like a sudden
spread of black wings, there one moment, gone the next, and then
she really was just a kid, standing there, her weight on one leg, a
switchblade held casually in a dark hand.

Hank wanted to cry a warning to her. Didn't
she see the man had a gun? Before he could open his mouth, the
killer stiffened and an expression finally crossed his features:
surprise mixed with pain. His gun went off again, loud as a
thunderclap at this proximity, the bullet kicking sparks from the
fire escape before it went whining off into the darkness. The man
fell to his knees, collapsing forward in an ungainly sprawl. Dead.
And where he'd been standing … the girl …

Hank blinked, thinking the girl had somehow
transported herself magically from the top of the cab to the
pavement behind the killer. But the first girl was still standing
on the roof of the cab. She jumped to the ground, landing lightly
on the balls of her feet. Seeing them together, he realized they
were twins.

The second girl knelt down and cleaned her
knife on the dead man's pants, leaving a dark stain on the fabric.
Closing the blade, she made it disappear up her sleeve and walked
away to where the woman Hank had been trying to rescue lay in the
glare of the cab's headlights.

"You can get up now," the first girl said,
making her own switchblade vanish.

Hank tried to rise but the movement brought
a white-hot flare of pain that almost made him black out again. The
girl went down on one knee beside him, her face close to his. She
put two fingers to her lips and licked them, then pressed them
against his shoulder, her touch as light as a whisper, and the pain
went away. Just like that, as though she'd flicked a switch.

Leaning back, she offered Hank her hand. Her
skin was dry and cool to the touch and she was strong.
Effortlessly, she pulled him up into a sitting position. Hank
braced himself for a fresh flood of pain, but it was still gone. He
reached up to touch his shoulder. There was a hole in his shirt,
the fabric sticky and wet with blood. But there was no wound.
Unable to take his gaze from the girl, he explored with a finger,
found a pucker of skin where the bullet hole had closed, nothing
more. The girl grinned at him.

All he could do was look back at her,
stumbling to frame a coherent sentence. "What … how did you …?"

"Spit's just as magic as blood," she said.
"Didn't you ever know that?"

He shook his head.

"You look so funny," she went on. "The way
you're staring at me."

Before he could move, she leaned forward and
kissed him, a small tongue darting out to flick against his lips,
then she jumped to her feet, leaving behind a faint musky
smell.

"You taste good," she said. "You don't have
any real meanness in you." She looked solemn now. "But you know all
about meanness, don't you?"

Hank nodded. He got the feeling she was able
to look right inside him, sifting through the baggage of memories
that made up his life as though it were a hard-copy resume,
everything laid out in point form, easy to read. He grabbed hold of
the cab's fender and used it to pull himself to his feet.
Remembering that first image of her he'd seen through his pain,
that impression of dark wings rising up behind her shoulders, he
thought she must be some kind of angel.

"Why … why'd you help me?" he asked.

"Why'd you try to help the woman?"

"Because I couldn't not try."

She grinned. "Us, too."

"But you … where did you come from?"

She shrugged and made a sweeping motion with
her hand that could have indicated the fire escape above his cab or
the whole of the night sky. "We were just passing by—same as
you."

He heard a soft scuff of boots on the
pavement and then the other girl was there, the two of them as
alike as photographs printed from the same exotic negative.

The first girl touched his forearm. "We've
got to go."

"Are you … angels?" Hank asked.

The two looked at each other and
giggled.

"Do we look like angels?" the second girl
asked.

Not like any kind he'd ever seen in
pictures, Hank wanted to say, but he thought maybe they were. Maybe
this is what angels really looked like, only they were too scruffy
for all those high-end Italian and French artists, so they cleaned
the image up in their paintings and everybody else bought it.

"I don't know," he said. "I've never seen
real angels before tonight."

"Isn't he cute?" the first girl said.

She gave Hank another quick kiss, on the
cheek this time, then the two of them sauntered off hand in hand,
like one of them hadn't just healed a gunshot wound, like they
weren't leaving a dead body behind. Hank glanced down at the
corpse, then looked back up the alley where the girls had been
walking. They were gone. He leaned against the cab for a moment,
dizzy. His hand rose to touch his shoulder again and his fingers
came away tacky with the drying blood. But the wound was still only
a puckered scar. The pain was still gone. He'd be ready to believe
he'd imagined the whole thing if it weren't for the blood on his
shirt, the dead man lying at his feet.

Straightening up, he finally walked around
the corpse, crossing the pavement to join the woman he'd stopped to
help. She sat on the pavement, back against the brick wall behind
her, the lights of the cab holding her like a spotlight. He saw the
same dazed expression in her features that he knew were on his own.
She looked up at his approach, gaze focusing on him.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I don't know …" She looked down the alley
in the direction that the girls had taken. "She just took the pain
away. I can hardly hold on to the memory of it … of the man …
hitting me …" Her gaze returned to Hank. "You know how when you're
a kid, your mother would kiss a scrape and you'd kind of forget
about how it hurt?"

Hank didn't, but he nodded anyway.

"Except this really worked," the woman
said.

Hank looked at the blood on his hand. "They
were angels."

"I guess …"

She had short brown hair and was holding a
pair of fashionable glasses with round tortoiseshell frames. One of
the lenses was broken. Attractive, late twenties to early thirties,
and definitely uptown. Well dressed. Low-heeled shoes, a
knee-length black skirt with a pale rose silk jacket, a white shirt
underneath. After tonight the outfit was going to need
dry-cleaning.

Secretary, he decided, or some kind of
businesswoman. A citizen, as out of place here as he'd be in the
kinds of places where people had a life on paper and paid taxes.
Met her Mr. Goodbar in some club tonight and things just went
downhill from there. Or maybe she was working, he thought, as he
noticed the camera bag lying in some trash a few paces away.

He rinsed his hand in a puddle, wiped it
clean on his jeans. Then he gave her a hand up and fetched the bag
for her. It was heavy.

"You a photographer?" he asked.

She nodded and introduced herself. "Lily
Carson. Freelance."

Hank smiled. He was freelance, too, but it
wasn't at all the same kind of thing. She probably had business
cards and everything.