Shadowshaper (4 page)

“¿Qúe pasó?” Manny the Domino King peered at Sierra across the game table in the Junklot. Rutilio and Mr. Jean-Louise sat on either side of him, each decked out as always in their best guayaberas and Stetson hats. Two empty chairs sat at the corners of the table — one for Lázaro and one for Papa Acevedo, both longtime domino warriors, now departed.

“I was gonna ask you the same thing,” Sierra said.

“Trouble at school, Sierra?” asked Mr. Jean-Louise. “Public school is a cesspool of poisonous bile.”

Manny threw his hands up. “¡Cállate, viejo! The child needs her education. Don’t ruin it for her just because you dropped out of kindergarten.”

“When I am finished this move, Manny,” Mr. Jean-Louise declared, “you will be in that nursing home on Classon Ave, rotting like a forgotten cabbage.”

“If you take any longer,” Rutilio chortled, “Sierra here will be in the nursing home by the time you’re done. Anyway, your entire family tree is a sad weed that I pull from my garden and spit on before I feed it to the rats.”

“School’s out for the summer,” Sierra said. “And y’all ridiculous. Hey, I was wondering what happened to that guy Ol’ Vernon because —”

“Nothing.” Manny shifted his considerable weight on the little wooden chair and fussed with his skinny goatee. The other old gentlemen exchanged frowns. It was the only time Sierra had ever seen them look seriously at each other. “No pasa nada.”

“What do you mean
nothing
? You said he was missing in the
Searchlight
this morning.”

“Yep, he’s missing,” Manny said.

Mr. Jean-Louise smacked a domino on the board. Rutilio cursed under his breath.

“That’s it?” Sierra crossed her arms over her chest.

Manny kept his eyes on the board. Dominos clacked against each other.

“Alright,” Sierra said. “I’m gonna go paint. Manny, let me know when you feel more talkative.”

“Make sure you cover that nasty tower with every wild monster you can imagine, Sierra,” Mr. Jean-Louise said.

“Top to bottom,” Rutilio added.

“I’ll drink to that,” Manny said. They each produced a brown paper bag with a bottle inside. One by one the three friends poured a little splash of rum out for Papa Acevedo and then swigged. “Ah! It’s the wall I think that bothers me the most,” Manny continued. “We used to be able to see all the way down the block, past Carlos’s Corner Store to the church, and then down beyond that the hospital. ¿Ahora? Carajo. The blankness of void vacant estupid.”

“If you don’t make a move soon,” Rutilio said, “I will make sure that that’s what they write on your gravestone.”

“It’s not even my go, coño, it’s Lenel’s.”

“Here lies Manuelito,” Mr. Jean-Louise said. “The blankness of void vacant estupid.” He shrugged. “He was somewhat liked.” He and Rutilio crossed themselves. Manny grumbled and shuffled his pieces.

“Good-bye, weirdos,” Sierra said.

Papa Acevedo’s face could barely be seen now. Sierra looked up at it as she walked to the foot of the Tower. If no one would answer her questions, she would do what she’d always done when people she cared about stonewalled her: She’d lose herself in art.

She’d already finished most of the dragon’s mouth — its lips snarled back to reveal huge razor teeth around an explosion of hellfire. Today it was time to get the eyes on point. Sierra put her headphones on and let the crashing salsa-metal fusion of her brother Juan’s band, Culebra, wash over her as she climbed the scaffolding.

“Cuando la luna llena,”
a voice crooned,
“mata al anciano sol.”
It was all she could hear before Juan’s thrash of electric guitar exploded across the song, blotting out the rest of the lyrics. The creeptastic night before still lingered in her mind, but the music kept the chills at bay.

Sierra set up her paints and dabbed a few slender blobs of white on the dragon’s pupil. When she was done with the eye, she’d start filling in some of the scales along the neck. It was more monotonous work than the face details, but it had to get done. Cymbals crashed; Juan’s wailing guitar and the swirl of keyboards all screeched to a halt.
“Mira que los enemigos se caen,”
came an urgent whisper,
“La voz del espiritu llama / Y la energía surge como …”
and then bam! Culebra burst back in as one: guitars, bass, drums, and keys a single, relentless electric roar.

Sweat poured down her back, and she was glad she’d worn a T-shirt with the sleeves torn off and shoulders open. She’d tucked her fro under a red bandana and removed all the jangly bracelets and necklaces she usually wore.

Sierra dipped her brush in the white paint again just as the scaffolding shivered. She took off her headphones. Someone was coming up. “Hello?” she called.

“Hey!” Robbie’s face appeared a floor below her.

“Robbie!”

He climbed onto the platform next to Sierra and paused to catch his breath. “I was worried about you last night. You just … you disappeared!”

Sierra put her hands on her hips. “Actually,
you
disappeared, sir. What I did was called running for my life.”

“I looked for you!” Robbie raised his shoulders all the way up to his ears. “I swear! I just …”

“Uh-huh.” Sierra raised an eyebrow at him and realized she was enjoying Robbie’s discomfort. “Here.” She handed him a paint roller. “You can make it up to me by laying down some primer and then painting something cool over there to go along with this dragon.”

“Anything I want?”

“Go to town.”

“Nice!” Robbie crouched over the tray, popped open a can of white primer, and gooped some in. “I mean, the thing is … I was really scared too, especially when you disappeared, and …”

“Ran for my life.”

“Right, when you ran for your life and I wasn’t sure what to do.” He covered the roller and started spreading paint evenly across the wall.

“Dang, you really know what you’re doing, huh, Robbie?”

He shrugged. “You know I’ve done some murals here and there. Anyway, when you …”

“Any I’ve seen?”

Robbie stopped painting and looked at her. “Actually …” He nodded toward Papa Acevedo’s frightened face.

“You did that? I had no idea!”

“Yeah, he … yeah.” He shook his head and turned back to the wall.

“What’s wrong, Robbie?”

“Nothin’.”

Sierra clenched her teeth. No one ever wanted to talk about what was bothering them. She swallowed a sigh of frustration — who was she to Robbie anyway? He didn’t owe her any explanations. She turned back to the dragon eye.

“I mean,” Robbie said. He was facing the wall, his eyes closed. “I don’t know how to talk about it.”

“Does it have something to do with the murals fading?”

He nodded sadly. “You noticed, huh?”

“I saw it and … yesterday, there was a …” Sierra took a deep breath, felt Robbie’s eyes on her. “There was a tear. It came out of Papa Acevedo’s eye and slid down his face.”

Ever so slightly, Robbie smiled, but he looked like he was about to burst into tears. “You saw it.”

Sierra nodded. He didn’t call her crazy. He knew. It felt good. For a few seconds, their eyes held each other’s.

“So you wanna tell me what the shadowshapers are?” Sierra said.

Robbie looked away.

One of Juan’s heavy metal songs started blasting from Sierra’s pocket. She made a face at Robbie. “To be continued.” She stepped away and tapped her phone. “Yeah, wassup, B?”

Bennie sounded excited. “That cat you asked me to check up on? Doctor Wick?”

“Yeah.” Sierra walked quickly to the other side of the scaffolding, cradling the phone with her shoulder.

“¡Oye!” Manny yelled from the ground, where he was laying down some more primer. “Esafety first, nena! And we’re about to break for lunch, so let me know what you want me to order from Chano’s.”

“Okay, Manny!” Sierra waved at him. “What about him, B?”

“He’s a Columbia professor. Or was.”

“How’d you find out?”

“This amazing thing they have now. It’s a web and it’s mad wide. Like, worldwide.”

“Wow.” Sierra rolled her eyes. “I coulda Googled his ass myself. I wanted you to, you know, go deeper! Get all Bennie-nerdtronic and get me his ATM pin and favorite colors or something.”

“Whatever, girl, listen: I need you to suppress the urge to make a corny pun about what I’m about to say.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“He has a Wikipedia page.”

Sierra bit her lower lip. “You’re no fun at all.”

“Believe me, whatever you were gonna say, I already thought of it. Anyway, there’s not much on there except that he’s a big anthropology whiz, expert in something called
urban spirituality systems
, went to Harvard, worked at Columbia, and then fell off the side of the earth. Dude’s old-fashioned for his generation. It’s not like he was out there liking people’s angry gerbil videos or nothing. So that’s as far as it goes, at least on the Internet streets anyway. There is, however, one place where there’s quite an extensive collection of Wick memorabilia. Or Wickabilia, as we say in the field …”

“Bennie.”

“I made
you
promise no corny puns. I made no such promise.”

“That wasn’t even a … You know what, just go on.”

“He has a paper trail. I know, seems so archaic, right? It’s at the Columbia anthropology archive.”

“Sweet!”

“Good luck getting in, though. Not like you can just dougie on through the front gates.”

“Ha. I got people that are experts at these things. Thanks for the help, B.”

An anthropology expert. Maybe Wick had been studying Grandpa Lázaro’s shadowshaper thing, whatever it was. If she could find him, maybe he could help her figure out what was going on. Maybe he’d know how to find Lucera.

Robbie had started painting another intricate Robbie-design, some kind of skeleton woman unraveling across the Tower wall. It was perfectly creepy. Sierra sized him up. “I’m not through interrogating you, bro.”

Robbie kept his eyes on the painting. “I know, sis.”

“I’ll be back later.” She shook her head, scrolled quickly through her contacts, and made a call.

“What it do, Sierra baby?” Uncle Neville sounded chipper as ever.

“How you feel about doing your goddaughter a solid on this lovely Saturday morning and taking a quick ride uptown?”

“So when popo came around the block, we just laid low,” Uncle Neville said, smiling at his own memories with those big, nicotine-stained teeth. “You know, acted like we was all some dumb stoop Negroes with nothing better to do.”

“And what happened?”

“Well, Hog knew better than to make a move. He was scared of us but he was just as scared of the cops. But when they rolled past, he tried to break out. T-Bone tripped him and we let him have it.”

All the windows were rolled down in Neville’s dark blue 1969 Cadillac Seville, and the wind whipped across Sierra’s face as they zipped north along the FDR. Manhattan was a towering mass of skyscrapers on their left. To the right, the East River sparkled orange in the midday sun.

“You killed him?”

Neville exploded with laughter. “Naw, girl! What kinda gangster you think your ol’ godfather be?” Sierra wasn’t sure how to answer that, but fortunately he just kept talking. “We’da never done that to the brother. Then we’da been just like the police, and that’d defeat the whole point. We just turned him upside down a few times, you know, and sent him on his way, never to be seen from again. Think he landed in Tennessee or somethin’.”

“He hurt Sheila pretty bad?”

“Spent three weeks in the hospital. And she never spoke to a single one of
us
again.”

“Dang …”

When Neville smiled, his narrow cheeks seemed to fold into themselves to make room for that great wide mouth. He always got happy talking about the good ol’ days, even though most of his stories ended with people getting messed up. Sierra and Bennie had stayed up entire nights trying to work out what exactly it was Neville did for a living. Asking directly seemed like a breach of some unspoken protocol. Anyway, it was more fun to guess.

“What is it we doin’ up at Columbia again?” Neville asked. He gripped the leather steering wheel with one hand and fished around inside his jacket for another cigarette with the other.

“It’s hard to explain,” Sierra said. “But basically, I need to do some research on something. Kind of about my family — my grandpa Lázaro, actually.” She shot a meaningful look at him to see if he’d take the bait. Neville kept his eyes on the road. “It’s about some missing Columbia professor he knew, so I gotta get into some files. But I don’t think they’ll let me in.”

“Family history, breaking and entering, weird secrets locked up in a Ivy League fortress,” Neville said. “Sounds like my kinda mayhem. You got a plan?”

Sierra shook her head. “That’s why I brought you along. That and the Cadillac, of course.”

“Of course.”

It was hard to believe that the wide-open, ultramanicured campus of Columbia University was in the same city as Bed-Stuy. Sierra actually gasped when they walked in through the front gates and stood surrounded by all those pillared temples of knowledge and lush lawns. Summer-term students milled around in small clumps, chatting excitedly.

“So we’re on a college visit,” Neville said.

“In June?”

“In June.”

“Alright,” Sierra said.

Neville steepled his fingers. “And you are a bookworm.”

“I like books.”

“You love books, so you wanna see the library. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Now, get into character, pick yourself a Ivy Leaguer, and ask directions.” Sierra took a step toward a cluster of chatting students. “Make it a boy, Sierra,” Neville said under his breath. “And smile.”

She forced a cheeseball grin across her face and walked up to an Asian kid in a baseball cap. “Hi, I’m a visiting student and I love books. Can you tell me where the library is?”

Behind her, Neville put a hand over his eyes and cringed.

“Um … it’s that huge building across the lawn,” the kid said, eyeing her.

“That was a disaster,” Neville said when she walked back over.

“Look, we found out what we needed to know. I never said I was a good liar. That’s your department.”

“Fair enough. Lead the way.”

“Where’s your ID?” the security guard at the library entrance demanded. They were standing in an imposing marble foyer, and Sierra felt tiny, a crumb in a giant, pristine oven.

“I left it at home,” she said.

“Then go get it.” The guard was about thirty, with greasy black hair slicked sharply against his skull and a shadow of stubble around his chin. He looked as if he had this conversation at least fifteen times a day.

“I can’t,” Sierra said.

“Why not?”

“I’m locked out my room.”

“Then call the main office. They’ll send one of our guys to let you back in.”

“I can’t,” Sierra said again. And then her mind went completely blank. “I gotta … go.” She gritted her teeth and walked outside to where her godfather waited by a low stone wall.

“Didn’t think so,” Neville said.

“I tried.”

“Okay, my turn.” He strutted off toward a grassy area where students were gabbing in small groups.

“Where you going?” Sierra called.

“Watch and learn, child.” Neville was getting more than a few suspicious glares from the mostly white students. His towering frame, slick suit, and dark skin put him in stark contrast to everyone else around. He carried an old-fashioned leather briefcase in one hand and a smoke in the other. Sierra felt her ears get hot as a wave of whispering and snickers erupted in his wake. She lost track of him for a second, and then caught sight of his bouncing Stetson hat making its way back to her through the crowd.

“What was that all about?” Sierra said. “And where’s your briefcase?”

Neville, now empty-handed, walked past her without stopping. “Stay here,” he said quietly. “Wait for the right moment. Imma be in the car.”

Sierra wanted to go with him. The whole situation was making her more and more edgy, but there was no turning back now. Neville had gone and done whatever it was he’d done, and that was that. Besides, finding Wick was her best clue for figuring out the rest of Lázaro’s riddle. She plopped miserably on a bench and waited.

Less than five minutes later, a commotion erupted from the picnic tables. Students scattered hurriedly away and campus police emerged from all directions, faces and bodies tensed for a fight.
Can’t take Uncle Neville anywhere
, Sierra thought, but just then the greasy-haired guard came out of the library alongside a few others and ran toward the ruckus on the lawn.

Sierra stood up and poked her head through the glass doors. No one was watching the entrance. Ignoring the tap dance her heart was doing in her ears, she ducked quickly through the low security arch, past the guard post, and into the library.