Midnight Taxi Tango

by Daniel José Older

  Carlos manages a forced smile. “We’re trying to find some information ’bout an architect or real estate agent named Garrick Tartus. Any chance you’d have some info on him in the reading room?”

  “The reading room for suckas,” Dr. Tennessee says. “The back stacks where all the good shit hiding. If you workin’ on anything deeper than a middle school book report . . .” She peers over her bifocals at him.

  Carlos nods.

  “Well, then, you gonna need to go into the back stacks. You smoke?”

  “Cigars.”

  The doctor flashes a grin. “Gimme one.” Then she ambles off down a corridor and around a corner.

  I roll my eyes. “What kinda librarian smokes in the resea—”

  “Well, c’mon, then, mister. Ain’t you gonna join me?”

  “Go on, C.” I give him a little push. “I think she likes you.”

  • • •

  The corridor lets out into a narrow open-air walkway that must lead between two wings of the library. Air conditioners and ventilation fans hum around us, and the sky is just a gray sliver behind crisscrossed pipes and a mesh of cables.

  “What kind is it?” Dr. Tennessee asks, inspecting the cigar.

  “Malagueña.”

  She perks up. “Ooh, like the song?”

  Carlos shrugs. “I guess?”

  The little librarian hums a melody as she flicks her lighter and inhales. “Ahh! This right here: absolutely. With this, I get you whatever information you need. You having one too, right?”

  “You’re not worried about, you know . . . ?” Carlos sweeps his hand at the vast library around us.

  “My good sir, we are outside and standing on concrete. A cigarette would have to literally defy every rule of physics to set something on fire, and anyway, I dispose of my butts in this nifty little tin.” She holds up a small lidded box. “And if you think for a second that I would let anything happen to these books, you’ve lost your mind. Now, sit. I can’t smoke alone.”

  Carlos eyes her for a second, and I can tell he’s wondering if perhaps we stumbled into some mad book-keeper’s secret lair. In a way, we did, I guess. Finally, he relents and lights up the one he’s been working on all day.

  Dr. Tennessee looks at me. “You, young lady, are too young to smoke.”

  “Oh, I know. Trust me.”

  “The thing is,” Carlos says, “this is a matter of some urgency.”

  “What’s your name?” Dr. Tennessee asks.

  “Carlos.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I . . .”

  “Who your best friend?”

  “Listen . . .”

  “No? Okay. You can’t come to my workplace demanding all kinds of answers and you ain’t even really know me, just like you wouldn’t like it if I did that to you. Dig? Now, have a seat and enjoy a smoke, Speedy Gonzales.”

  For a second, I think Carlos might cut her. I’m busy trying not to bust out laughing, but he looks like his blade hand’s getting twitchy. Then he does whatever it is Carloses do to calm down, probably silently hums that damn song of his, and leans against the wall. He closes his eyes, takes a long drag, and smiles.

  “That’s better.” Dr. Tennessee chuckles.

  “You kick ass,” I tell her. “I been trying to get him to chill for a year.”

  She smiles. “I’m alright. Now, whatchyall wanna know ’bout this Garrick Tartus guy?”

  Carlos opens his eyes. “I thought . . .”

  I punch him. “He had a realty and construction company up in Morningside.”

  “So?”

  “He builds tunnels,” Carlos says. “We need to know about the tunnels. There has to be some ordinances, some exceptions made, something. You can’t just build tunnels under houses in New York City, right? We need to know where he did his work, who his clients were, everything.”

  Dr. Tennessee looks up at the sliver of sky. She closes her eyes and releases a stream of smoke. I watch it rise, very like a ghost, and then disperse. “Yeah, I can help you,” she finally says.

  Carlos smiles for the first time in a while. “Excellent.”

  Then King Impervious’s voice blasts out of my hip: Make me who I am what I do, I’ma be with you; mothafucka do what I say to mothafuckin’ do, bi—It’s a number I don’t know, so I answer with a curt “Hello.”

  A smoke-stained voice asks for Carlos. I scowl, hold the phone out to him. When he goes for it, I pull it back, cover the mic, and say, “Don’t be giving all ya bitches my number, C.”

  He narrows his eyes and takes the phone out of my hand. Then he stands up real quick, and that already grayish pallor goes a shade paler. “Just now? Shit.”

  Dr. Tennessee and I trade scrunched-up faces.

  “Yeah. But it’ll take me a minute to . . . At the Harlem Public Li . . . Oh, okay.” He hands me the phone. “I have to run. Kia, you gotta handle this.” He nods at Dr. Tennessee. “Thanks for your help, Doc.” And then he makes for the door back to the main library.

  “C,” I yell. “I don’t even know what I’m—”

  “Tunnels!” Carlos yells over his shoulder. “Find out about the tunnels.”

  And then, like a dick, he’s gone.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Carlos

  I hop into the Crown Vic idling outside the library and it screeches off before I can close the door.

  “Well, alright then,” I grumble when I’ve finally got myself situated. There’s no seat belts, so I end up clinging to the doorframe for dear life as we blast over the 59th Street Bridge toward Queens.

  The driver is huge, all shoulders and massive arms bulging out of a tiny Hawaiian shirt; he’s got a boisterous goatee and no other hair at all. He grins at me in the rearview. “You Carlos, right, man?”

  “Shit, I better be. We already halfway to wherever we going.”

  He busts out laughing and then suddenly scowls. “No, of course not!”

  “Excuse me?”

  He rolls his eyes in the rearview and gestures to the little blinking device in his right ear.

  “Annie, how am I gonna be talkin’ to you and ask if you name Carlos? Don’t make no sense, Annie. C’mon, girl . . . No . . . no . . . yes.” He does a little shimmy in his seat and then swerves sharply into oncoming traffic and dips back into his lane, avoiding massive disaster by milliseconds.

  “Annie, baby, I need you to put that PhD to work and not say stupid shit, ’kay? I’m driving and stupid shit makes me accident prone . . . Oh, word, it’s like that? Fa’real? Okay! Okay! Okay!” He claps at each “okay” and bleats the horn in between. “Yeah, bye! No . . . bye! Good-bye, Annie! Yes! Okay, baby girl. I see you tonight . . . yeah . . . mm-hm.”

  I’m not thinking about Sasha. I mean, yes, I am, but only just now. My thoughts don’t dart back to her every ten minutes. It’s because shit is happening, moving fast, in fact, so who has time to dwell? Plus, I made a new friend today, and she reminds me of me.

  “White girls.” The driver snickers. “They will destroy me one day, but I will die happy.”

  I’m not really sure what to say to that, so I just nod and look out the window.

  “I’m Rohan, by the way. You can call me Fantastic.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “That’s what they call me, man, not my fault. Actually, they call me Mista Fantastic at the club, but you know, I don’t wanna sound arrogant.”

  “I mean . . .”

  “You mad gray, son—you know that?”

  “I do.”

  “Aight. Just lettin’ you know. Might wanna get that checked out is all I’m sayin’.”

  “Thank you, Mista Fantastic.”

  Industrial Queens whirrs by, and then we zip over the little Pulaski Bridge and into Brooklyn.

  • • •


  Reza stands in the center of a cramped Bushwick apartment. An older Mexican guy in a leather jacket fiddles with a laptop on the floor while a woman in a sharp business suit sorts papers at the kitchen table. There’s a heavy by the far window—tall, muscled, and silent as a statue. In the corner, a white woman in her midtwenties sobs into a handkerchief that matches Reza’s immaculate suit.

  All of that is background noise though. My eyes pass over it all quickly and then land on the dead girl on the couch. She was maybe twenty-five, twenty-six. Caribbean with South Asian roots. Permed black hair frames her bloated face, tongue bulging, makeup smeared, eyes glassy, empty. One arm hangs over the edge of the couch, knuckles just grazing the ground. She’s in Snoopy pajama pants and a Yankees tank top. There’s an upside-down bowl of cereal by her side and a small island of milk seeping into the carpet.

  “Diana, the roommate, found her an hour ago,” Reza says, nodding at the crying woman. “She’s . . . she was one of ours.”

  Rohan crosses to the far end of the room and folds his arms over his chest. In seconds, the chuckling chauffeur has become an unfuckwithable foot soldier.

  I approach the body. “Do we know anything?”

  “We were together last night,” Diana says, sniffling back tears and snot. She has an oversized John Jay sweatshirt on and librarian glasses. “Had dinner at the Rosebud, and we were talking about how we were gonna make ends meet now that Charo’s shutting things down. We both got tuition, and even when Shelly gets her MSW, what kind of salary does a social worker make? Ugh! I guess it doesn’t . . . matter now . . .” She teeters on the edge of falling apart again, but doesn’t. “I had a client last night, saying good-bye more than anything, tying up loose ends, and I stayed over. Shelly said she was just gonna go home and read; you know she loves those romance novels. Then I had class today and errands and . . . and . . . and then I came home and . . .” She shakes her head, face contorting into an ugly cry, but no sound comes out.

  “You called nine-one-one?”

  “She called us,” Reza says. “Fortunately. Can you get anything from the body?”

  “I can try.” I kneel beside the couch.

  “Memo,” Reza says to the heavy at the window, “take Diana to the base. She doesn’t need to see this.”

  He nods and helps the roommate gather herself. When they leave, Reza says: “This is Shelly, Carlos. The one from . . .”

  I nod. I’d figured as much. “She’s been strangled.”

  Reza nods. “But look at the marks.”

  I tip her chin up. Two tiny handprints discolor either side of her throat. “Shit,” I whisper.

  Reza considers me for a moment and then looks at the older guy on the computer. “Rolando, do you have what you need?”

  “Oh yeah, got plenty here to work with.”

  “Alright, head back in with Memo and the girl.” Rolando packs up quick and leaves. “Bri?”

  The woman at the table grimaces at the handwritten pages of a small book. “Nothing going on in the journal so far,” she reports.

  “Keep looking,” Reza says. “Carlos?”

  “I’m on it.” I close my eyes. Clearing the sobbing girl out of here opened up the space to me. All that shock and sorrow was getting in the way. What’s left is Reza’s cool efficiency, the jumbled diary entries Bri’s browsing, Rohan’s brooding stillness.

  I place one hand on Shelly’s cool forehead. Her last gasping moment blasts through me: something is off in the apartment; it’s darker than it should be. No one else is home, but it doesn’t feel that way. There’s a presence. She sits, picks up the bowl of cereal she’d poured herself, takes a spoonful. Drops the spoon. Drops the bowl. Throat throbs with dull pain, breath gone. Holy terror courses through me, Shelly. As she collapses in slow motion against the pillows, a face flickers in front of hers: a child, mouth twisted, eyes sunken back and wild. It’s just a flash, and then everything goes black.

  “Wait a minute,” Bri says from the table. I grunt as I pull sharply back to reality.

  “You okay, Carlos?” Reza asks.

  I blink to clear the little spots dancing across my vision. “Fine.”

  “What you got, Bri?”

  “Bugs.” She holds up the journal. Crude drawings of cockroaches sprawl across the pages.

  “Date?” Reza asks.

  “It’s from two months ago.”

  Reza crosses the room in a single long step and grabs the diary. “Fuck.” She flips a few pages ahead and holds it up to me. More roaches.

  “Fuck,” I say.

  “If it was before everything that went down,” Bri says. “How . . . ?”

  “She’d seen them before,” Reza says. “Carlos?”

  “I can try. No promises.”

  “Rohan,” Reza says. “Poke around the boxes in her closet. See if there are any journals from earlier on.”

  I turn back to the corpse, shake my head. It’s hard enough pulling last memories out of bodies. Two-month-old memories? This’ll take some digging.

  The most recent horror is a blur of gunshots in the darkness, screams, and the sense of a thousand creatures swarming from the deep. A dingy filter coats a cloudy street; Shelly’s more remote memories look like they were filmed with an old movie camera through a dirty window. It’s night. A white man in a suit walks beside her; his grasp on her forearm is too tight, his gait fast. He wants what he paid for. A light drizzle begins, and they duck into an alleyway and Shelly drops to her knees, fumbles with his fly.

  Daylight blasts through the blinds; head pounding, Shelly stumbles into the kitchen, fusses with the dishes. Shelly in a wide-open garage, arguing with a stocky, tense-looking cat. He’s not arguing back though, just shaking his head. Shelly at the movies, some rom-com where pretty white people fall in love, fall out of love, make speeches, fall in love again. Shelly on the toilet, studying. Shelly on the bus. Shelly bored out of her mind in class, trying to stay awake. Shelly riding another businessman, then another. Shelly with two men at once; neither of them can get it up and they both sulk and rage around the room at her. Shelly crying in the bathroom mirror. Shelly meditating. Shelly laughing with two other women at the Rosebud at daybreak. Shelly calling someone whose voice sounds very old and far away, talking about how well school is going. Shelly watching TV texting falling asleep to the sound of rain walking beneath the tracks lighting a clove ciga—

  “Carlos!”

  “Guh.” The coffee table cracks against my back as I surge away from the body. I get up quick. Too quick—the world goes fuzzy for a few seconds, and I’m about to eat floor again when Reza puts a firm hand on my arm and eases me into a recliner.

  She glares her question at me.

  “I’m alright. And no . . . I went back months and nothing. No roaches. Something like that would’ve leapt out at me, unmissable.”

  “So it happened before. Why didn’t she tell us?”

  At the table, Rohan and Bri comb through a stack of cutesy inspirational journals.

  “There’s roach drawings in all of ’em so far,” Bri reports. “Like, every couple months, all the sudden, it’ll just be roaches.” She holds up one, and you can tell from the swirly handwriting it must be from when she was a schoolkid.

  Reza grunts and pulls a phone out of her jacket pocket. “Yes?” She smirks and holds the phone out to me. “It’s the twelve-year-old that doesn’t want you to give her number out to us bitches.”

  I hold the phone away from my ear until Kia finishes her deluge of curses. “You done?”

  “Not nearly, but I’ll finish later.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I got an address for you.”

  “Oh?”

  “1254 Sunnyside Lane, Queens.”

  I fumble for a scrap of paper and scribble it down. “What is it?”

  “Where Tartus first s
tarted his tunnel work. And the payer address for all the other projects.”

  “Well, shit.” I stand up.

  “Weird thing is,” Kia says, “that’s, like, right around the area I lived for a couple years when I was a kid.”

  “That is weird. Real suburban, right?”

  “Yeah.” Kia takes a breath like she’s about to say something, then doesn’t.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Kia, what?”

  “I’ll tell you later. It’s too much to get into now.”

  “You okay?”

  “Chillin’. Dr. Tennessee talking my ear off about John Coltrane or some shit, but I’ll be alright.”

  In the background I hear the old librarian cough a laugh.

  “Be careful, Kia.”

  “I’m fine, C. I gotta head off to capoeira anyway. Don’t worry about me.”

  She hangs up, and I look at Reza. “Feel like a drive to Queens?”

  “Always,” Reza says with a disarming grin. “But I have a meeting to hit up first.”

  “Ooh, I love meetings. Can I come?”

  “You could, but we’d literally have to kill you.”

  “I actually hate meetings anyway. I was kidding.”

  “I know. I wasn’t. There’s a taco spot around the corner from the garage though. You can hang out there till we’re done.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Reza

  A few years ago, Rohan rolled up into the garage in one of those massive Access-A-Ride vans the city uses to cart around folks too old for the regular buses. “City marshal auction,” he replied to our collective what-the-fuck faces. “Someone had been smuggling drugs with it and they impounded the sucka, and now it’s mine—uh, ours!”

  Charo, always the tactical genius, let loose a rare smile. “Well done,” he said. A week later, it was painted black and the tall windows and windshield were tinted and bulletproofed. Charo presented it to us with a bottle of champagne. “Behold, the Partymobile.”

  “It’s like an unstoppable death tank,” Bri gaped. “But fun!”