Uncle Janice (15 page)

“Location,” said Sergeant Hart.

“Never mind,” Janice said, disappointed the woman didn’t have any crack vials in her diaper bag. “Uncle just went into a bodega.”

To avoid seeming even more obviously obvious—“The art of ghosting,” Fiorella had once told her, “is doing jack shit convincingly”—she drifted into a nearby taco cart line. It stretched far enough down the sidewalk that she could feign impatience and jump out whenever Tevis reappeared. And if she did reach the front, where the ground beef was sizzling on the grill, she could get a water or guava juice to ease her
overstrained vocal cords. She shuffled forward, closer to the cart’s garlicky steam puffs. Maybe she should get a taco, too, for authenticity purposes. Maybe—since this was her favorite food cart, one of the few never to have liquefied her bowels—she should get herself a couple of tacos, which were so much better than the ones her mother used to make, the Ortega kind out of the box with the little white packet of not enough red sauce. Her father always complained the shells broke as soon as he picked them up. And there he was! Back in her dome, making himself comfortable, twisting the anxiety dials. Her stomach was grumbling, her brain was on auto-flagellate. She looked in her purse to see if she could even afford a taco.

“Can we get an update?” the sergeant asked. The Nextel’s obligatory beep-beep bookended his transmission. “Itwaru? Do you copy? Can we get an update?”

Up near the front of the line, a curly-haired Latino turned around. Atypically for her, she struggled to determine his age. He had the oddly angled face of a teenager whose features had not yet snapped into focus, but any potential boyishness was offset by a flaming eyeball tattoo on his neck and a goatee so finely groomed it looked like stage makeup. His chin jutted out to the left as if someone had long ago broken his jaw for him. With small white teeth—nubbins really—he smiled at her, and she smiled right back.

“Itwaru,” the sergeant said.

“Oh, will you shut up already,” she said into the Nextel. “I’m getting us tacos. I’ll be home in a minute.”

Tevis limped out of the bodega across the street. Unable to make any buys so far, he’d bought himself a pack of cigarettes, which he kept slapping against his palm. Her face must’ve betrayed some sort of recognition when she spotted him. She must’ve squinted or arched her eyebrows. She must’ve done something, because the Latino turned his head to follow her line of sight across the street. They both watched Tevis pat his coat and pants pockets, as if looking for matches. When the Latino, still grinning, turned back to her, she stepped out of the line and slunk away.

The Impala crept down the avenue no more than two blocks behind
her. Maybe. Probably. Standard operating procedure dictated that backup teams stay within the kel’s frequency range, but since the kel didn’t work the investigators might still be parked all the way back at the Tibetan restaurant, or possibly in one of Woodside’s Irish pubs with their white faces hovering over Guinness pints. She walked with her head down. The ghost watches the uncle, but who watches the ghost? She wanted to ask the investigators for their location, but she didn’t know how without sounding like the chicken-shit little sister who needed her big brothers close by in case she got jumped.

At the intersection she braved a look over her shoulder. She didn’t see the Impala or, thank God, the goateed Latino, but she did see Tevis, a hard man to miss when he wasn’t ghosting. He had found a Smoker’s Samaritan, a young black kid willing to offer his lighter. They were talking to each other—the kid, at least, was nodding—and Janice once again looked around for the goateed Latino before putting the kid’s scrip over the radio. With his back to her, she didn’t have much to say:
Uncle has approached a young black male, around six feet, puffy jacket and reversed Knicks cap, hard to tell his build
.

“Is it a buy?” the sergeant asked.

“Hold on,” she said.

She stood as still as the traffic pole while street-crossers streamed past her. The kid had his hands in his pockets. A 7 train rumbled far away down the tracks, a local or express, she couldn’t tell which. Her eyes were leaking wind-tears. She waited for Tevis to button his coat, his positive signal to indicate he’d made a buy, but instead he reached into his pocket for a cap of his own, a rusted orange Kangol that belonged to the early nineties as much as the thuggish Looney Tunes on his T-shirt. When he put the cap on, the kid began to look around, clearly nervous. He stepped off the curb and into a puddle, something going on here but she didn’t know what. Still unbuttoned, Tevis’s coat fluttered behind him with the wind.

“I don’t think it’s a buy,” she said into the Nextel.

“It’s not a buy, or you don’t think it’s a buy?”

The kid cut across Roosevelt into Elmhurst, a bordering neighborhood
where the streets left the grid to zigzag without reason or logic. She told Hart it wasn’t a buy, but with the 7 train now directly overhead she couldn’t hear his response. She couldn’t see the kid anymore, either, or the goateed Latino, who’d apparently vanished. But she could still see Tevis. That was her job, to always keep him in sight. He was laughing on the sunny side of the street, pleased with both himself and the world. As if to share the joke with someone else, he took out his own Nextel, which uncles kept on silent for obvious reasons. A slug of gray ash lengthened off his cigarette. When the train had slid far enough down the tracks to no longer be thundering, she heard both Sergeant Hart demanding an update and her cell phone ringing inside her purse. Tevis was waiting for her to answer. He stared blankly ahead, as if he couldn’t see her, even though she was only fifty feet away at the intersection, the crazy lady with a phone pressed to each ear.

“I love that kid,” Tevis told her, his lips lagging behind his words. “Hart, oh man, Hart is
really
going to love that kid.”

“You made a buy?” she asked.

“Are you serious?” Now he turned to look at her because he always,
always
, knew exactly where she was—ghosting or buying, it didn’t matter. He said, “I gave you my positive!”

“Your coat’s not buttoned!”

He tugged on the Kangol. “My cap,” he said. “I put on my cap.”

“That’s
my
positive!” Actually, in the winter, her positive was taking the dockworker cap
off
, but either way: she was hats, he was buttons, no need to confuse it, that’s how it had been since they’d started working together.

“In the car,” he said. “I told you. I wanted to switch. Because I’ve been in a slump. I
told
you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t remember that.”

“Because you weren’t paying attention. The kid saw it. Do you realize that? He was like, ‘That’s your positive signal, isn’t it?’ Exact words, Itwaru. You understand what I’m saying? The frickin’
kid
knew.”

“I’m sorry, okay? I’ve been sorta distracted, my father—”

“You’re my ghost,” he said. “You’re not allowed to be distracted.”

He hung up in her ear, but in the other ear Sergeant Hart kept chirping for an update. Without admitting blame—it seemed irrelevant—she told him that the uncle had in fact made a successful buy after all. She repeated from memory what little description she had: six feet tall, adult black male with a puffy jacket and at least one soggy sneaker. And a Knicks cap, too, although he’d probably already stashed it behind the wheel of a parked car, along with all his drugs and the buy money. When she explained that he’d run into Elmhurst’s jumbled streets over a minute ago, the line went dead. She pushed down the Nextel’s antenna with her teeth. Not only had she allowed a drug dealer to evade capture, but she’d also cost Tevis a buy on the rumpus’s whiteboard. Not only that, she’d robbed the investigators of an opportunity to fill out two to three hours of OT-approved paperwork at time-and-a-half. Not only that—it never ends!—now the investigators would have to fill out two to three hours of
non
-OT-approved paperwork explaining why the uncle had brought back without a perp. Oops, never mind. To save them all from that particular hassle, Tevis was crouched over the curb across the street, slipping his buy into the sewer, where one of New York City’s mutated alligators would swallow it whole and spend the rest of this night happily swimming on his scaly back. The Nextel chirped back on with a series of miniature honks, most likely Sergeant Hart banging his head against the steering wheel. He told her his investigators had no interest in chasing a poorly described knucklehead they’d never catch. He also asked that in the future she try not to be a complete and utter fuck-up, which she thought was an entirely unfair criticism, which was itself a Big Boss specialty. She’d been alternating ghosting assignments between Tevis and Gonz for seventeen months now and had never before missed a positive signal. She hadn’t even really made a mistake since her first day as an uncle when she let that huckster disappear into an apartment lobby with the department’s twenty bucks. But the Narco Big Bosses, like Big Bosses everywhere, tended to fixate only on fumbles. Over the Nextel she heard either McCarthy or Duckenfield in the background asking if she had at least gotten the tacos.

Good news or bad news? Bad news: Tevis went buyless for the rest of the day.

The good news: it was March 8, and the end of Puffy’s shift marked the end of his first eighteen months in Narcotics. He’d officially just made detective. Back at the rumpus, where Richie had strung up a congratulations banner, uncles and investigators came by to slap his back and shake his hand. Klondike and Morris argued over whether he should invest his new pay raise into property or a money market. Eddie Murphy wrote down the number of a good accountant. James Chan beamed but said nothing. A sleepy, yawning, nightcap-wearing Grimes was the first to call him Detective Okazaki, the name a surprise to half the rumpus who only ever knew him as Puffy. Pablo Rivera, now the rumpus’s second-most-junior detective, bequeathed the ceremonial Sherlock Holmes deerstalker cap and pipe, with an added warning to watch out for Internal Affairs. Despite his strong chin and clear eyes, even Puffy couldn’t make that cap look unridiculous. Fiorella pinned to his shirt a plastic badge from the toy department at Rite Aid, something Janice wished she’d thought of herself. He’d get his real detective shield later in the month, at a private ceremony at One Police Plaza, but in the meantime all the uncles except Gonz took him out for celebratory drinks at A.R.’s Tavern, which had a dangerous Saturday-night special on three-dollar Cosmos.

She floundered down her alleyway at around two o’clock in the morning. Before going inside the house, she wiped her feet on the back door’s welcome mat and saw little green needles stuck in its synthetic fibers. No wonder she’d fucked up Tevis’s buy! She’d been hexed, walking around all day with bits of her father’s Christmas wreath stuck to her shoe bottoms. His own stinking shoes sat near the door, as they had every day of her life, these boots as much as part of the world behind her house as the alien-fruit tree. She picked them up. Unwilling to pluck every pine needle out of the welcome mat, she instead carried her father’s boots down the alley and threw them away in Mr. and Mrs. Hua’s fishy-smelling
garbage can. Immediately feeling lighter, feeling winged, she bounded back up the porch steps. She knew her mother had wanted to protect the family from ghosts, but what you have to understand, Mama, is that those boots were haunted all on their own. They
had
to go. Plus, Janice had drunkenly, definitively decided that she wasn’t going to believe in ghosts anymore.

But since when has that ever stopped them?

A couple of nights later, she and Fiorella dolled up for the triple T: Techno Techno Tuesday at the Pure Magic Dance Hall and Lounge. They wore shredded fishnets, shimmering shirts, a racoonish amount of eyeliner, and two spritzes apiece of Fiorella’s Truly Pink perfume, which got immediately absorbed by the burnt dust smell of the club’s fog machines. An actual disco ball splintered green strobe lights. Up in a crow’s nest, a DJ spun bass-heavy
oonst-oonst
records for a surprisingly dense crowd of dancers, most of them underage, almost all of them simultaneously grinding their teeth and the person in front of them. Janice’s shoes stuck to the floor. Because coincidentally she and Fiorella were each expecting their periods, and because nightclub bathroom dispensers sold only cheapy brands at outrageous prices, they’d brought their own emergency tampons, just as they’d brought along their own ghosts: Tevis, like a proper specter, melted into the fog, but that miserable prick Gonz headed straight to the bar to pay no attention to them whatsoever and sip on nine-dollar Budweisers.

Janice pushed herself into the crowd, confused as to how ordinary citizens could party like this on a weeknight. Didn’t they have algebra tests to take? Jobs to show up for? Unconcerned with what would surely be a miserable hump-day morning, they appeared high on weed, coke, Ecstasy, or some combination of all three. They tipped their mouths
back to swallow the music. Their flowing hands fashioned invisible pottery from invisible kilns. Some of these children sucked on actual pacifiers, but not a one of them would be getting arrested. At least not for selling or using. At least not tonight. The arrests, when they came, were still a few months away. The Big Bosses had sent Janice and Fiorella here to make one buy apiece and then leave, so as not to stoke suspicion, so as to lay the foundation for an eventual case against the nightclub itself. Because Sergeant Hart preferred these two buys to come directly from Pure Magic’s impure employees, Fiorella went looking for a barback with dilated eyes or a sniffy nose. Armed with techno song names from a Google search before leaving the rumpus, Janice climbed a spiral staircase toward the DJ’s crow’s nest. There was no one to stop her. All the bouncers were outside pretending to check fake IDs. When she reached the DJ booth, a white DJ—a sticker on his purposefully dorky button-down said
HELLO, MY NAME IS WHITE DJ
—looked up from his turntables, annoyed, as if he expected her to request the latest Beyoncé song.