Half-Resurrection Blues (21 page)

Y
ou sure?” Riley says. We’re on a rooftop watching Eastern Parkway fill with revelers.

“I am. It makes perfect sense: two million people flooding the streets of Brooklyn in full regalia, raging street parties all through the night and straight on past dawn. I don’t think any supernatural mischief maker could resist such a distraction. Plus, it has the added benefit of culminating mere blocks from Mama Esther’s and in the whole area surrounding Prospect Park’s eastern edge.”

“This is all true.”

“Plus-plus: there’ll be a hundred thousand spirits in the air, taking part in the festivities. And the people will be in masks and feathers. Even folks with the Vision will be confused between the living and the dead.”

“Indeed. Of course, there’ll also be a bajillion soulcatchers swarming through the crowd, sacking folks up and lugging ’em back downstairs.”

“Bah.” I wave the very idea away. “Sarco’s not scared of soulcatchers. Doesn’t mean a thing.”

“And now the real estate Hasid is in play.”

“That ain’t him, man. Whatever it was Sarco did to
bring me and Sasha back, it’s not what he did to Moishe. He’s just a shell, Riley.”

“He a corpuscule.”

“A whobascule?”

“A corpuscule’s like an empty body with an angry-ass spirit shoved in it. Rude as fuck thing to do to someone if you ask me.”

“Sounds about right. Whatever it is, it . . .”

Riley’s doing something to his face. “I’m listening,” he says, but he’s busy squinting and probing his fingers along his left eye.

“No, you’re not. What’d you lose a contact or something?”

“Dammit, Carlos, the dead don’t wear contacts!”

“Well?”

“Hang . . . the fuck . . . on.” Suddenly, his fingers slide all the way into his socket and he makes a little
guh!
noise, something between a gasp and a grunt.

“Riley!”

“I’m okay. I’m okay.” But his other eye tears up, and he’s still squinting and writhing. Then, with a nasty popping sound, he pulls out his fingers. And, I realize, his eye.

“Gah!”

“Here.” He hands me the eye.

“No! The fuck I’m supposed to do with this?”

“C’mon, man, don’t be such a little girl. You put it in.”

“Put it in?”

“In your eye, Carlos. I wanna try something.” He waves the glowing sphere at me. “Take it.”

He’s not gonna give up. Plus, I’m almost as curious as I am horrified. I take the eye. It’s nebular like him, just a gentle tickle against my fingertips and a little mushy. “Put it in?”

“Your eye.”

“Ugh, Riley!”

“Look, we do it all the time ghost to ghost when one goes into the Underworld and the other’s up top. If it works right, you should be able to see what I see once I go downstairs.”

I look at the shimmering ghost eye. “Shouldn’t I give you my eye if . . . ?”

“Carlos.” Riley gives me a Riley look. “Don’t act new. You should know better than to come at me with some anatomy and physiology bullshit. Save it for your living friends, okay? The dead don’t fuck with those rules. We much more holistic than that. If I see some shit with one eye, the other eye gonna see it, even if it’s in you. Intent takes you a long way in the Underworld. Anyway, I said I wanted to try it. I don’t know if it’ll work at all with your damn flesh-and-blood ass, but since we’re splitting up and what I see will matter somewhat to your situation, I figure it’s worth a shot.”

I think I hurt his feelings. I brace myself and then turn the eyeball to face out and place it up against my own. There’s a little resistance at first. I’m sure my body is screaming
What the everlasting fuck
, but eventually Riley’s eye slides into place and all I feel is a slight pressure.

“There. Not so bad, right?”

“And it should work when you get downstairs?”

“Should.”

“But I’ll still be able to see up here with my right eye, right?”

“Unless you poke it the fuck out, yeah. You’ll get the hang of it. You can kind of toggle back and forth by squinting once it starts working. You’ll see.”

“Great.”

We watch the burgeoning mass of partiers gather beneath us.

“Okay,” Riley says. “How you wanna play it?”

*   *   *

It’s actually the day before the parade, but the celebrations begin tonight. The NYPD has lined up barricades all along Eastern Parkway and cops in riot gear stand around, shifting their collective weight from one foot to the other and waiting for some shit to go down. Their red and blue lights pulsate across the block. Vendors are setting up food stands, guys have tables draped with flags from every imaginable Caribbean island and a few they mighta made up. Young people wander in laughing droves up and down the blocked-off street, carrying on, getting lifted by the excitement in the air. You can taste all that collective energy pointing toward a wild and terrific night.

And then, of course, there’s the spirits: they’re everywhere. Ghosts whip through the air in fancy, colorful pirouettes, shimmy up and down the street, cavort and converse above the heads of the living revelers. They’re tiny, flickering specks of light and they’re gigantic, blimplike, floating fatuously across the night. They’re swarming packs of dwarfish chattermouths, and they’re long-legged, tall-walking long faces, all serious in the face of coming celebration. It’s a joyous sight, so many spirits wandering free, and I wonder briefly if Sarco isn’t onto something marvelous . . . If it weren’t being masterminded by a sociopathic dickhead who probably killed me and the woman I love, I might very well be all aboard for figuring out a way to close the gap between the living and the dead.

I head to a food stand, dodging a guy painted all blue
who teeters drunkenly across the parkway on ten-foot-tall stilts. Home-cooked rice and peas, spicy jerk chicken, and steamed cabbage—a beautiful thing. Fills me up just right, and when I’m done I toss the Styrofoam container and head west toward the park. The streets are already getting crowded. I see a few soulcatchers slip silently between passing bodies, watch them circle and then disappear like sharks, hunting down some petty offender, no doubt. I roll my eyes. Tonight is not the time to be chasing our tails. At least backup will be readily available if things get hairy. In theory, anyway.

Somewhere among this teeming, feathered mass of life, Sarco lurks. Moishe’s tattered shell is out there too, I’m sure. And so is Sasha. I’ll be so happy when I can think her name without shuddering deep inside.

*   *   *

Something horrible happened. People are running, crying. Cops have their visors down and their faces clenched; hands linger near service revolvers and wrap tightly around billy clubs. I swig from my flask and slide between the rushing crowd, flowing gracefully against the current. This might be something in my department, or it might just be some same-old street-festival bullshit. There’s a kid in his twenties sitting on the ground, cursing. He’s not wearing a shirt and a few superficial gashes crisscross his chest and shoulders. He stands up, wobbles, curses some more, and sits back down. PD is barging around nonsensically, trying to create their own brutal order out of the chaos. Some EMS guys work their way through the crowd, but neither one is Victor. The uniforms close in around the slashed-up guy, blocking him from view till all that’s left of him are shouted curses and the bloodstain on the sidewalk.

*   *   *

At the southeastern corner of the park, a group of teenagers twists and grinds to some pounding soca music. The rhythm gets into you, beats against your bones, and finds you vibrating whether you want to or not. They’re all wrapped around one another, pulsing in time. A light rain has started, barely more than a mist, and no one seems to care. They’re all sweat-soaked anyway.

Past the writhing teenagers, I glimpse a tall shadow lurking in the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour pharmacy. Moishe’s haunted shell. I make a point of not breaking into a run. Instead I vanish backward into the crowd, work my way down a side street, and reappear around a different corner, coming toward the empty lot from the side.

He’s gone. He’s gone, and now I wonder if he was even there at all or just another of my paranoid imaginings. I glance back and forth, but the crowd is tremendous, a vast, pulsating mass of revelers, and even a gigantic mostly dead white guy could disappear into it as long as he ducks down a little. I catch a flash of movement from the side street I just came down and swing my head around. Nothing.

I wait.

Someone staggers out into the lamplight, someone tall. I launch forward, not bothering to conceal myself anymore. He’s a block and a half away and seems to fade back into the velvety shadows as I approach.

A few rats scurry around. Trash is strewn everywhere. The thumping soca rumbles along. He must be so close, watching.

“Carlos.”
Riley’s voice in my head startles the shit out of me, and I almost drop my cane. “
You there?”

Not like I can respond. I make sure to keep my concentration fixed on whatever imminent attack awaits and halfway listen to Riley. “
You were right. Sasha was at her place, and now your girl’s on the move.”
My girl. That jackass. He wouldn’t say that if we were in the same room. Okay, he probably would. “
She just left her building and is going north on Ocean. I’m keeping a distance cuz I assume she can spot ghostly motherfuckers like myself.”

My eyes scan overflowing trash barrels, a rusty old Dumpster with two smashed televisions sitting in front of it like attentive manservants, a darkened streetlamp, a flicker of movement that turns out to be more rats, a whole repeating collage of colorful posters for upcoming dance parties, a dimly lit billboard.

“Something else . . .”

A little farther down the block, a piece of metal clatters wildly against the pavement and splashes into a puddle. As I whirl around toward it, I catch movement in the corner of my eye. It’s very close to me—something stirring in the shadows. I’m unsheathing my blade as the giant rumbles out of the darkness, knocking me onto my ass.

“I don’t really know how to tell you this, Carlos.”

I have no idea what Riley’s ambling on about, but I have more important things to deal with right now. I swift kick Moishe in the gut as he closes on me, but it does little to hold him back. He growls and drops forward onto his knees, his hands stretching toward my neck. I roll out the way just in time not to get strangled, but he catches my ankle.

“It’s Sasha . . .”

I
fwap
my cane across his face and batter it against his arms. He holds tight. Fine. I unsheathe and chop off his hand. Moishe roars, a guttural, inhuman noise that chills my
bones. I stumble to my feet and turn around. The giant’s already up. Blood trickles languidly from his stump of a wrist. He looks at me and howls with rage.

“She’s pregnant.”

The giant charges.

P
regnant!” I yell it so loud that I actually startle the giant for a second and he loses his momentum. Not that I’m in any position to take advantage. I just stand there gaping like an asshole. He lunges. I manage to sidestep only just enough so I get shoulder checked instead of full-body demolished. I lose my grip on the blade, and it goes clattering off into a pile of garbage. The sound knocks me out of the daze—I stumble backward and clear out of the way of his swinging fists.

My blade is out of reach. Running is useless because one of the giant’s strides equals four of mine. So I grab the nearest trash can and thrash him with it as hard as I can when he dives for me. It catches him full across the face, which stuns him just long enough for me to bring it down on his left knee. When he crumples, I hit the same knee again, and this time I hear it snap pleasantly. He moans, and I crack him across the face again.

Okay. (1) I need my blade back, and (2) pregnant?

What? I can consider Thing #2 as I deal with Thing #1, but still . . . it gives me pause. The giant groans and rolls over. I know he won’t stay down long, even with the solid thrashing I gave him. Plus, I’m a little dizzy from
whatever damage he did on me. I stumble toward the trash pile that my blade clattered into.

I think Riley said Sasha was pregnant. I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. It makes sense, I suppose. A season has passed. She’d be showing. But where’s my fucking blade? Panic churns the emotional confusion that’s already prickling my brain. There’s a million crumpled up soda cans, shredded candy wrappers, Chinese food containers, all devastated and scattered about like some decimated city after a hurricane.

But no blade.

I hear something behind me and spin around. The giant is gone.

“Hey, Carlos. Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to drop a bomb like that and then disappear. It’s just . . . there’s a lot going on out here.”
No shit. I hate not being able to have a two-way conversation. No blade. And Rasputin the Invincible Giant that I just fucked up has already run off.

“Yeah, anyway, I guess we’ll deal with the preggo thing later, cuz right now, ya girl is making her way very quickly . . .”
Riley pauses to catch his breath, and for a second all I hear is his heavy panting in my ear.
“Sorry, she’s fast. She’s going to the entrada, Carlos. I don’t know . . . I don’t know if Sarco’s somewhere, or what the deal is, but like it or not, what we gotta deal with right now is that Sasha’s making moves. Pregnant and everything. Sorry, man. Maybe it’s not yours.”

I wish he would stop talking.

“Anyway, when we get underground, the Second Sight should kick in, and you’ll be able to see for yourself, so that’s . . . nice. Ah, fuck. I gotta catch up with this chick, man. I’ll check in with you in a bit.”

Terrific.

Sasha’s heading for the entrada. Which means she’s
either meeting Sarco somewhere in the Underworld or . . . or she really is masterminding this whole fiasco. Or maybe some other wildly plausible explanation I just can’t think of right now. Either way, she’s surely heading for Mama Esther’s.

I have to get there first.

As I think it, the dead giant lopes out of the shadows again. He’s limping badly but otherwise doesn’t seem nearly as worse for wear as he should. I don’t have time to fuck around with Andre anymore. I got places to be. I hurl one last trash can his way for good measure and make a break for
it.