Midnight Taxi Tango

by Daniel José Older

  • • •

  We’re at the tunnel’s edge when I hesitate. You can judge me if you want, but if you haven’t felt a girl like Angie move against you, look at you the way she looked at me, and then lost her forever, you just don’t know. I hesitate because I can’t have both, but I can’t stomach the thought of leaving Angie’s sad corpse behind. Not now. Not when I just found her.

  Could this love be greater even than my will to live? I think if I hadn’t shot Shelly I’d really be in a fix. I’d probably try to bring them both, and then we’d be caught for sure. Shelly lets out a series of gasps. I don’t think the wound is too bad—looks like it went straight through without clipping any major arteries, but still: it’s there. I look at the spot where the top of Angie’s green-brown hand breaks the surface, and then I shoulder Shelly and we hobble through the tunnel and carefully, painfully up the stairs.

  It’s behind me. That gangly long-armed motherfucker. I can hear it scrabbling around, limping with that horrible grace through the tunnel toward us. Shelly screams, a horrible gurgly sound, and we break into a pathetic, ungainly run. We’re out of the kitchen and into the front foyer when I hear the wooden door bust open and smack against the wall. It’s panting and sniveling. I would turn back and take a shot, but we’re already at the front of the house. Someone’s standing there in the darkness of the porch, a short, stocky figure. I raise my gun, bracing myself against the wall.

  “Reza?” Charo. My God, it’s Charo.

  “Charo!” I gasp, and drag Shelly with me out into the fresh night air. Charo raises a shotgun as we pass. He points it into the hallway. His face—I catch a glimpse of it before I hurtle down the stairs—it’s calm, not tensed or sweaty or nothing; his eyes so peaceful, almost sleepy. I know that face. It means he’s about to kill.

  • • •

  The last time I cried was in the fourth grade, and it was the first time I’d been shot. And the first time I ever shot anybody. That was it. Angie used to cry when she came hard enough, great heaving sobs as her pelvis rocked into my face and my hands worked her nipples. It would move me—believe me, it did—but never in a way you could see. She knew how to decipher those small shudders along my cheekbones, the way I’d look away, the patterns of my breath. But no one else. No one else could ever know.

  Now, running full bodied and barely breathing out of this house, I still don’t cry. I almost do though. It’s the closest I’ve come in all these years, the tears sneaking around the edges of my eyes, waiting. The truth is, I’m too afraid to cry. Too in it. I hurl forward, and it’s like Shelly is barely there, might as well be floating above me for all I notice, but we’re both out and breathing and panting and she’s throwing up, bleeding still, and I’m not thinking about Angie’s broken, abused body being back in there all alone with the monsters. I’m not I’m not I’m not, but I am.

  Miguel is standing there in front of his Crown Vic. He’s got one of those emergency gray rescue blankets opened up, and I’ve never been so happy to see him in my life. I hand Shelly off to him, and he makes a little Shelly burrito with that blanket around her and lifts her easily into the cab. Then he looks at me. I’m soaking wet and panting, put my hands on my knees and lean forward to catch my breath, but otherwise I’m okay. I wave him off.

  “The fuck happened?” Charo wants to know. No boom came from the doorway; the thing must’ve held back. Surely it’s watching us, lurking.

  “Angie” is all I can say. “Angie.”

  It’s all I need to say. Charo nods his chin toward where Shelly is writhing in the backseat. “¿Y esa?”

  “Flesh wound,” I say. “But I don’t know what else happened before I got there. They were doing something when I showed up.”

  “How many?”

  “At least two. A . . . thing . . . man, I guess. Long arms. Fast. And something else. Something cockroachy in a robe. I got it though. But there’s more. I know there’s more. But, Charo . . .”

  He looks at me. His expression’s still that muted emptiness that means someone’s about to die, but I know he’s listening. “I have to get her. I have to go back in.”

  Miguel knows better than to say anything, but I see him start forward with horror. Charo just nods toward the door. “She’s . . . ?”

  “She’s dead, yeah.” First time I’ve said it. First time it’s felt true. It only makes the need to bring that body back stronger. I won’t take a full breath until it’s done. “I can’t leave her.”

  Charo studies me for a fraction of a second. “Miguel,” he says, still staring at me. “Take Shelly to the base and call Dr. Tijou. Tell her what happened.”

  “What the fuck did happen?”

  “Tell her what you know.”

  Miguel shakes his head, walks around to the driver’s side. He gives me one last doubtful look, mutters, “Be careful,” and then hops in and speeds off.

  “Your trunk is full?” Charo says.

  “Always.”

  • • •

  The street is empty. It’s late, a quiet night. We gear up quickly: more ammo clips, more bug spray, some shock grenades. We move fast up the porch and into the house. Our motions are aligned: a singular two-headed four-armed angel of death, a perfect killing machine after decades of staying alive side by side. The place is empty again—no movement, no shadows spring to life. That smell lingers though. It’s a decaying type of stench. It’s everywhere.

  Down the stairs and through the freaky-clean playroom, into the tunnel. Nothing comes. No bugs, no gangly man. Nada.

  “Here.” The first word I’ve spoken in what seems like a long, long time; it’s just a hoarse whisper. I wade back into the dark waters, Glock leveled at the blackness around me. The light at the far end is out, so I have to feel my way along. Behind me, Charo makes barely a sound as he enters the water, the slightest intake of breath and then a tiny splash as the waves circle outward from him.

  I have one hand stretched out ahead of me, just over the surface of the water. I feel those body parts rub against my legs as I move forward. I should be near the edge by now, but there’s no Angie. A little desperation creeps into my grasping, a whisper of nervousness. She’s not here. I make a little splish noise as my hand pats the water. She’s not here. I reach down, holding my breath, swipe from side to side. Nothing.

  Charo moves past me, gun first. The tunnel opening interests him. I’m considering the possibility that I imagined Angie being there in a fit of desperation when my hand brushes past something that feels like metal. The ring. Angie. I wrap around the hand it’s attached to and pull; a dark shape breaks the surface.

  “Charo,” I whisper. He doesn’t answer, so I look up and he’s frozen, staring past me down the tunnel where we came from. There’s something behind me. It’s true in the tiny hairs standing up on the back of my neck and the clenching in my gut, true in my finger as it tenses over the trigger.

  “Down.” He says it so quietly. It’s a whisper, just for me. If I’d hesitated even a second, I’d be splattered across the tunnel, another body for the collection. Charo’s double barrel comes up as I fall face-first into the water. I tuck forward and glimpse behind me as I fall: silhouetted in the dim light of the tunnel, there’s another tall robed man, just like the one I blew away. He’s there for only a second before Charo unleashes that deafening blast and the man disintegrates into a raging swarm.

  For a moment, the water closes over my head. I come up sputtering, still clutching Angie’s wrist. Charo’s gone. Something’s there, a bluster of movement in the darkness. It’s Charo, I realize, but he’s covered, every inch of him, covered, in the pale swarm. He’s not screaming, but only because he knows what’ll happen if he opens his mouth. I belt the gun and retrieve the can of spray, put it directly on my friend, and blast away. It only sort of works. A few flutter away, a few move aside. Mostly they are unperturbed. We have to get out of here.
<
br />   • • •

  Charo’s brushing them off with quick, deft slashes of his hands as we grope through the darkness out of the water. In the tunnel, I help him find his face beneath the writhing, squirming creatures. I can see he’s doing everything he can not to lose his shit. For a few seconds the only sounds are our hands brushing feverishly against his skin, his clothes, and then his panting, coughing back the urge to scream. Finally he nods at me. There are still a few on him, but we can’t stand here anymore, not knowing what’s coming from where. I hoist Angie onto my shoulders. She’s too heavy, and water and black ichor pour from her flesh. Something falls off, maybe a foot. I ignore it. I have to. We make it up the narrow stairs, back into the brightly lit playroom, so sterile and full of untold horrors. I know the short gangly one is watching us. He’s close. I can smell him, feel his eyes all over us. Then we’re bumping through the kitchen and once again into the hallway and finally, finally, out into the blessed night. There’s a little den above the Medianoche Car Service garage. It smells like air freshener with a hint of mold; a large window looks over the fleet of black Crown Vics to the big iron gate that keeps the world out. This is where they brought Lizette after she was gang-raped. She lay on this couch, staring at the ceiling, barely moving at all, achingly calm, while Charo and I took to the streets for revenge. The couch is draped with old blankets; one of the armrests is falling apart. This is where Santo lay dying after the Canarsie firefight, Dr. Tijou frowning over him, his arms flailing out like they were trying to grasp at some lifeline that wasn’t there.

  This is where Charo first told me Angie was gone. I don’t come here much ever since that day, but right now I feel peaceful—that calm the world brings after a battle. That calm of finally knowing after all these months.

  I’m wearing sweatpants tied tightly around my waist because they’re about eight sizes too big. My graying hair is slicked back against my skull and my skin is raw from so much scrubbing. Charo’s industrial-strength antibacterial soaps have done their thing and I actually do feel moderately clean, considering. Considering. I shudder, run a hand over my face, and plop onto the couch.

  Charo comes in wearing workout shorts and a Yankees T-shirt. It’s been decades since I’ve seen the man wearing anything but his usual button-down shirts and slacks. He stands there looking at me and then takes two Conejos out of his pack, lights them both and hands me one.

  It feels like an angel is giving me mouth-to-mouth, that first sweet inhale. A blessing.

  “Shelly?”

  “Dr. Tijou says she’s gonna be okay.” Tijou had been one of Haiti’s top trauma surgeons until she treated the wrong minister’s estranged nephew and ended up in Brooklyn patching up the survivors of various gangland massacres. She’s worked on all of us at one time or another, saved all our lives. Tijou’s always smiling and muttering things to herself in Creole and she’s smarter than anyone I’ve ever met. If she says Shelly’s gonna be okay, then Shelly’s gonna be okay.

  “There was something on her back though.” Charo scowls. “An opening.”

  I raise an eyebrow.

  “Tijou says it seems like they were trying to implant something in her. Eggs, she thinks.”

  “Eggs?”

  “Like they were using the girls as some kind of incubators. That’s what the doc says anyway. I don’t know. They’re still checking . . . Angie.”

  I nod.

  “Oh, and she gave me these for you.” He hands me a plastic baggie full of colorful pills.

  “Morphine?”

  “Retrovirals and antibiotics.”

  “Boo.”

  “Take them all. I got some too.”

  “Alright, alright.” I pocket the baggie.

  “I have something to say,” Charo announces. I do too, actually, but I stay quiet. Charo looks uncertain, another first for him. We smoke in silence. When we finish the cigarettes, he retrieves two more.

  “Want me to start?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  He takes a deep breath. “I’m done.” It’s what I was gonna say too, and in a way I’m not surprised. We’ve always walked parallel paths. “In fact, I’m mad that it took this”—a vague gesture toward the hell we’ve just been through—“to get me to this place. But no, I can’t . . . We can’t keep doing this. It’s”—a deep tug on the Conejo, a mountainous release—“not right. It’s wrong.”

  I nod. Tonight is full of surprises.

  “It’s been coming ever since Angie went missing,” Charo says. “I’ve seen it in you too. We can’t . . . We have to stop.” He’s staring out the window at the pipe-lined rafters over the garage.

  “You want to disband the whole operation?”

  “No.”

  “Oh?”

  “A change of direction, is all.” He shrugs, looks at me, and suddenly he’s the old Charo again. A mischievous glint dances in his eyes. “This work has connected me to a lot of very powerful, very evil people. Even more evil than us, I mean. People with genocide and child rape on their résumés. These are men who can nod and wipe out an entire village in Guatemala.”

  He’s not just talking about other gangsters either. I’d steered clear of the corporate connections Charo sent the girls to, mostly because I had the feeling I might lose my cool with them and cause problems for the company, but I’ve heard stories.

  “So you want to start a cleanup operation,” I say carefully.

  Charo smiles. He likes that. “Yes. Cleanup. Exactly. A balancing of the scales, we could say.” The smile grows wider, stretches to the far ends of his face; his eyes become squinty above those great big dimples. “Justice.”

  Charo can call it what he wants. I’m calling it revenge. “I’m in,” I say. “But there’s somewhere I want to start.”

  Charo nods. “I know.”

  Out the window, the iron gate shudders and rises with a groan. We stand there side by side and finish our cigarettes as morning pours into the garage.

  CYCLE TWO

  BURN THE WHOLE SHIT DOWN

  Fue mia la piadosa dulzura de sus manos,

  que dieron a mis penas caricias de bondad,

  y ahora que la evoco hundido en mi quebranto,

  las lagrimas pensadas se niegan a brotar,

  y no tengo el consuelo de poder llorar . . .

  The sweet compassion of her hands: it was mine;

  their caresses soothed my agony,

  and now that I evoke her, drowned in all I’ve lost,

  the tears I once imagined refuse to flow,

  and I’m without even the consolation of being able to cry.

  “Sus ojos se cerraron”

  tango, 1935

  Alfredo Le Pera

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Carlos

  Have you ever mourned?”

  I looked up, met Sasha’s deep stare. It was four a.m. and snowing—the worst night of my short, twisted life, the best night of my short, twisted life. My partner Dro’s screams still echoed through me; I could still see him fade into the oblivion of the Deeper Death as a swarm of tiny demons overcame him. Riley was in a coma; I’d barely made it out alive. And here I was, looking into the eyes of this woman, wrapped in the embrace of her apartment. She sat with one knee tucked up against her chest and her bare shoulders glinting in the dim lamplight. Her brown skin was tinged ever so slightly with gray, and her lips pouted just so as she stared at me, eyebrows creased.

  “Have I mourned who?”

  We hardly knew anything about each other, but we knew the one thing that made us different from everyone else. When we met a few nights before at a yuppie bar in Park Slope, we’d silently agreed to refrain from reading each other’s wandering spiritual information. We didn’t ask—we just didn’t go there at all. It was understood.

  So when she frowned and said, “You, ma
n,” it caught me off guard.

  Snow pirouetted wildly through the glow of streetlamps. The heater clattered an arrhythmic dirge and then sighed.

  Sasha didn’t rush me. The winter night felt infinite. Her stare didn’t demand answers, and when I met it again I felt a deep sadness open up inside of me. It was perfect and alone—a single long note from a trumpet.

  “No.”

  One corner of her mouth curved upward, just slightly. “Maybe you should.”

  I nodded. “Did you?”

  “Trevor and I did a ceremony about a year after it happened.”

  Trevor—her brother and only friend. Trevor, who I murdered on orders from the Council. I closed my eyes and sucked it all back in. There would be a moment to explain all that, I told myself, and this wasn’t it.

  “He wasn’t really trying to do all that, of course.” Her scoff held no humor. “But I convinced him. He was so sad and sulky all the time—at first, I mean. We both were. He knew he needed something to change.

  “I went to a vivero—one of those live poultry spots on Classon, you know? Got two pigeons. They put ’em in whatever ol’ box they have lying around, this busted Nike box, right?” She’s smiling now, and her eyes shine with oncoming tears. “Went to the bridge one warm night in October. The Manhattan Bridge. It was late, maybe two a.m., and we walked right to the middle of the bridge with this shoe-box birdcage and then we both said a little something, a prayer I guess, and then we let them go. They flapped up into the crossbeams and then out into the night.”