“Now you’re the one being disrespectful,” noted Santa Anna. “We talkin’ wifey material here, Jay?”
“Nah, she’s not…I mean, maybe one day, but—”
“We all been there, man,” nodded Santa Anna, thinking of Tanji at home. “You enjoy it, now, you hear?”
“No, it ain’t like that—I been in love before. This is…she ain’t like other women.”
“What?” Boone was awake. “She put her finger up your ass or something?”
“Sleeping beauty arises from her slumber,” greeted Bowie.
“But she ain’t lookin’ any prettier,” added Santa Anna.
“Nah, it ain’t like that Boone…” Jay didn’t look like he liked Boone kidding around about his woman.
“Well then, you ain’t felt shit yet, Jay,” Boone yawned. “Not till you got yourself in there balls deep, and she digs in with that index finger, right up to the second digit, tickle your prostate. Shit becomes clear then, like the meaning of life and—”
“What were you dreaming about?” asked Santa Anna.
Boone cocked an eyebrow.
“In your sleep,” said Santa Anna. “You were making a lot of noise. Fidgeting around.”
“Ah, that was nothin’,” Boone waved it away, then coughed. “Jay, you gotta smoke those shits in here? Can’t you at least smoke a man’s cigarette?”
Jay offered Boone a middle finger.
“That’s what I’m talking about, Jay,” Boone grinned. “Right up to the second knuckle. By the way, what the fuck are we listening to?”
“Madison’s fucking with us,” said Bowie.
Boone punched the wall that separated them from the driver’s compartment. The music got louder.
“Fuck,” he put his hand on his forehead.
“Hey, Boone,” Bowie thought he’d have some fun with the kid. “I bought my ma and her friend tickets to go see Johnny Mathis at Westbury. Now her girlfriend can’t go.”
Boone had a look on his face like he didn’t know what Bowie was talking about.
“Ma needs a date in two weeks. Think you can do me a favor?”
“Johnny Mathis? Why would I want to go see that fag? And would they turn this fag the fuck off!” Boone punched the wall again.
“Must be nice to be in love,” Bowie remarked to Jay.
“I didn’t say I was in love.”
“Nothing wrong with love, man,” offered Santa Anna. “You know what got me through the night, all those nights Inside?”
“All those hard white dicks?” wagered Boone.
Santa Anna looked at Boone but spoke to Jay. “Thinking about my wife. And my kids. That’s what got me through.”
“You tryin’ to intimidate me, lookin’ at me like that?” Boone asked nonchalantly. “Cause it ain’t working.”
Santa Anna ignored him.
“So you coming out tonight or what, Jay?” Bowie asked.
“Yeah, haven’t seen or heard much from you since you shacked up with what’s-her-name,” noted Boone.
“I think we’ll be there.”
“Gotta get the old lady’s permission?” goaded Boone. “See, Bowie, he’s already pussy whipped.”
“Boone,” stated Jay, “you’re a motherfucker, you know that? Pendejo…”
“Not your mother, Jay. I seen that bitch. And no, Bowie, I won’t be your mom’s date to see Johnny Mathis either.”
“In case you haven’t figured it out by now,” Bowie said it for Santa Anna but announced it nice and loud to everyone in the back of the van. “Boone is royal ball buster.”
“And here I was,” replied Santa Anna, “thinking he was just fucking with me.”
“When I’m fuckin’ with you,” promised Boone, “you’ll know it.”
“Remind me again, Boone,” Jay sounded slightly perturbed. “Why does Gossitch keep your ass around?”
10.
7:15 A.M.
“Kosh Amadid!” Fakhri welcomed them, gesturing expansively to the hookah on the low table. “Please, friends, help yourselves. Raheem will be here shortly.”
Santa Anna crossed his legs on the tasseled cushions around the table with Bowie, Jay, and Gossitch. The other men were outside with the van.
“It is good to see you, doostam,” gold glittered in Fakhri’s mouth as he smiled at Santa Anna. He was only five feet tall but he was nearly half of that wide and a red fez adorned his shaved head.
“It’s good to be back, my friend,” replied Santa Anna. It was true. It’d been a long time since he’d smoked the hookah at Raheem’s.
“Much too long you were away from us.” Fakhri bowed his head and the tassel on his fez swung back and forth..
“Well, I’m back now, Fak. And I’m planning to stay.”
“And your presence here pleases us, doost.” An attendant with an official Oasis Smoke Shop staff-shirt had parted the rugs separating their table. The man bore a cushion on which rested a blue glass bottle. He stood there until Fakhri clapped his hands and said something in Farsi. The man proffered the cushion reverently and Fakhri delicately took the bottle from its resting place in both hands.
The Persian placed the bottle on an empty cushion across from the four seated men.
“Please,” Fakhri gestured, indicating Gossitch, the leader of these men. “Smoke.”
Gossitch, in turn, nodded to Santa Anna, who thanked him.
Santa Anna took a long, slow pull off one of the four synthetic leather hoses attached to the hookah. The water in the glass vase bubbled and his lungs filled with the sweet shisha smoke. He held it and exhaled.
Fakhri was looking expectantly at him.
“Delicious my friend.”
Gold flashed in the Persians mouth again. He uncorked the bottle on the cushion and bowed to it.
“Raheem will be with you momentarily.” Fakhri held out an empty palm to the bottle and backed away. He turned around, clapped his hands and he and the attendant walked off elsewhere.
The table the men sat around was curtained off from the rest of the establishment by elaborately detailed Persian rugs hung around them. They sat on an enormous rug with a red field and scrolling golden vine ornaments. The rugs muted the sound of the other men in the Oasis, men who drank tea, smoked the shisha and played narde.
Jay, Bowie and Gossitch took turns drawing tobacco smoke from the pipe.
“I missed this,” noted Santa Anna after his second inhalation. “Nothing like the Oasis.”
“This has class,” said Bowie. “Should bring my ma here sometime.”
“Raheem done this place right.” Gossitch approved.
Santa Anna inhaled, closing his eyes and holding the smoke. When he’d exhaled he opened his eyes and Raheem was there, seated across from them on the cushion.
“Sobh Be Kheyr,” the genie wished them a good morning. “It is truly good to see you again, my friends.” Raheem beamed as he placed his bottle on the table next to the hookah.
“Rah,” Santa Anna smiled back, “you don’t look a day over two thousand years.”
The genie laughed, a hearty echoing reverberation that belied his diminutive size. Raheem, Santa Anna knew, could appear to different people as different things and in different guises. This morning his appearance was that of some westerner’s vision of a sultan, decked out in black baggy pants, a crimson sash under his vest, and a plumed turban. Santa Anna wondered if the genie appeared this way to play it up for the customers or if he really liked the fashion.
“You look well, Carter,” said Raheem. “Allah akhbar.”
“God is great,” agreed Santa Anna. “Seriously, Rah, you look like you haven’t aged at all.”
“You are too kind to this humble Ifrit.” Santa Anna knew there were different types of genies and that the Ifrit were known for their strength and guile.
“Frank,” the genie turned his attention to Gossitch. “Your people, always how you say? Buttering me up? But I must admit, the bottle has been good to me.”
They all laughed.
“I am well.”
“And this is good,” Raheem noted, his voice lowering. “For there is trouble about this city.”
“What have you heard?” asked Gossitch.
“Something kills,” noted the genie. “Something kills with vehemence.”
“That body in the water?”
“Was but one…”
“The bloodsuckers maybe?”
“Unlikely,” the genie shook his head, his whole body shimmering. Santa Anna knew if he reached out to touch Raheem his hand would go right through the being. “Such moves draw attention, and it is not attention the children of the night seek.”
“True Rah,” conceded Bowie, “but there’s always warring factions within their ranks, no?”
“In the past, yes. However, there has been a general truce for the last year.”
“Then what?” Gossitch asked, referring to the murders.
The genie held up his palms to the ceiling. “I am a simple proprietor of a smoke shop. I have no inside knowledge of these events.”
The attendant returned with a tray of fruit juices, placing one before each man.
“No-no-no, not that one for him,” Raheem waved away the glass the attendant went to place before Santa Anna. “Try the pomegranate, trust me. Anti-oxidants. A cancer fighter.”
Santa Anna sipped the juice he was given and nodded his approval. “Delicious.”
“Splendid!.” The attendant had disappeared with the tray. “May I ask you about your stay as a ward of the state?”
“Shoot,” invited Santa Anna, wondering what kinds of questions a genie would have for him about prison.
“Was it like this HBO program I see, Oz?”
“I wouldn’t know. Haven’t seen it.”
“Your quarters were a dayroom with cells and guards inside the unit?”
“No,” said Santa Anna. “Guards would come and go, up and down the halls.”
“Many terrible things could happen between these staff patrols, yes?”
“Could and did,” acknowledged Santa Anna, sipping his juice.
“Have you ever witnessed a man being anally violated?” there was genuine curiosity in the genie’s voice.
“Seen? No, but I’d hear it, at night.” Santa Anna remembered, though he didn’t want to. There were a lot of things he would prefer to forget about his time in prison. The indignities, big and small. The isolation. The thing that called itself Enfermo.
Raheem was asking him if he had a boyfriend in prison. Bowie elbowed Jay and the later choked on his smoke.
“I didn’t ride with no man inside,” answered Santa Anna. If anyone else had asked it, it would have been a fight, but he knew the genie was merely inquisitive.
“You were no punk, yes? Not a prag?”
“Definitely not,” Santa Anna smiled, imaging the genie watching his television shows. He wondered if Fakhri placed the bottle on the cushion in front of the TV or if Raheem assumed human form to sit and watch.
“And what do you do if someone wishes to violate you?”
“You gotta be ready to kill ‘em or die,” said Santa Anna. “It’s that simple.”
“I see. There was a time, in the royal court of Isfahan, when I myself was imprisoned and my neck threatened by the Shamshir itself—”
“Shamshir?” asked Jay.
“You call it scimitar. These were the days of Shah Abbas the First, the greatest ruler of the Safavid. A time of merriment, joyous days,” a wistful look came over the genie’s face. “I was a mere page in the court. And then prince Muhammed was murdered by Behbud Beg in the hamman. Khoda rahm kone,” Raheem asked god to have mercy.
“Hammam?” Bowie inquired.
“A steam bath,” explained Raheem. “And I was initially considered a conspirator and imprisoned. But I digress.” The genie looked to Gossitch. “Let us dispense with business so we may resume these pleasantries, no?”
“Agreed,” said Gossitch.
“What do you have for me?”
Gossitch told him about the van parked in back and its contents.
“Very good then,” Raheem snapped his fingers and Fakhri pulled back a rug and stepped into the enclosed area. He carried a briefcase which he laid down in front of Gossitch. The attendant in the Oasis smoke shop t-shirt stood behind him with two similar briefcases. Fakhri snapped the locks open and lifted the top, revealing stacks of rubber banded hundred dollar bills.
Bowie whistled.
“That’s beautiful,” said Jay.
“No, my friend,” Raheem admonished pleasantly. “That is dirty money. What is beautiful are the things one can procure through this.”
“True that,” agreed Santa Anna.
“Would you like to count it?” The genie asked Gossitch.
Gossitch held his hands up. “Never a need for that, Raheem.”
The genie smiled. “You flatter me with your confidence in my person.”
“It’s a confidence born out by time,” noted Gossitch.
“Undeniably the sands of time reveal all,” agreed Raheem. “Those that can be trusted,” he looked from Gossitch to Santa Anna, “and those that cannot. Yet, one would do well not to let the sands of time get in your lunch, yes?” The genie let loose a robust burst of laughter.
“You get funnier every time I see you,” said Santa Anna.
“Raheem has been attending open mic comedy nights,” interjected Fakhri.
“Really?” asked Santa Anna. “How’s that going for ya?”
“I am working on my delivery,” admitted the genie. “Would any of you happen to have any jokes?”
The men shook their heads.
“Fakhri, bring these to their vehicle,” Raheem indicated the briefcases. Fakhri and the attendant disappeared.
“These are some beautiful rugs, Rah,” said Bowie. “My ma would love these.”
“This one upon which we sit is from Herat.” Santa Anna wished Bowie hadn’t said anything. The genie was given to long-winded expositions on seemingly everything. He now launched into one, explaining the difference between Turkish and Persian rugs, which had something to do with the number of knots, but Santa Anna wasn’t paying attention, drawing on the shisha.
“Khoshet miad?” Raheem asked him if he liked the tobacco and when Santa Anna nodded the genie beamed again. “Oh, che khoob! Did you know that the hoses were once made of cane sugar? Now my friend,” he turned back to Bowie, “Solomon’s carpet was magnificent to behold. Sixty miles long and sixty miles wide it was.”
“Magic carpet, yeah?” asked Bowie.
“…Any place it goes is right/goes far, flies near, to the stars from here…”
“Did you just quote Steppenwolf?” Jay asked the genie, which laughed.
“Rah,” asked Gossitch. “What can you tell us about a vampire that walks in the day?”
“A day walker?” the genie looked incredulous, then certain. “Impossible. Myth.”
“Like a man who lives in a bottle?” Bowie nodded.
“Hmmm, point well taken,” the genie leaned forward over the table, closer to the four men. “There has been talk” he announced conspiratorially.
Gossitch pressed. “Talk of?”
“Talk of DNA splicing and genetic doping in eastern Europe, among the vampire themselves. Why might you ask?”
“This morning’s job,” said Gossitch, “something we saw.”
“Do tell,” invited the genie, clasping his hands.
“Tall vamp. Walked out into the rain. Yeah, it was dark, but…”
“But this thing you saw walked in the daylight, yes?”
“Yes.”
“There has been talk of a vampire from the continent,” Raheem maintained his conspiratorial tone. “Extremely tall, extremely cruel. Filled with a hatred that would defy the sun itself.”
“Sounds like our guy.” Bowie looked at Gossitch.
“What can you tell me
about this…creature?” Gossitch had been on the verge of saying thing, but thing had a derogatory connotation, one that might have offended the genie.
“I will counsel you to avoid it at all costs,” Raheem said aloud. “It has a propensity for violence and revels in bloodshed. Its appetites are said to be nothing short of enormous.”
“Its appetite for blood?”
“For blood, yes, but also for carnage and sex.”
“Carnage and sex, huh?” asked Santa Anna.
“What’s sex without a little carnage?” quipped Bowie.
“And, oh yes, it has three wives.”
“Three wives?” asked Jay. “Shit, isn’t one enough?”
“If she’s the right one,” offered Santa Anna.
“I myself had seventy wives in my seraglio,” the genie offered modestly.
“Seventy virgins, Rah?” Bowie asked with a salacious tone.
“Of course not!” Raheem waved his hand. “What man desires inexperienced girls who know not how to please him? I never desired su—is this where the blood you bring me comes from?” A serious look came over the genie’s face as it locked eyes with Gossitch. “From this creature of which we speak?”
“Yeah.” Gossitch would never lie to Raheem.
“Then we must be extremely super secret, my friend,” mirth filled the genie’s voice again. “Like your double agent, what is his name? Double-oh-seven.”
“Actually he’s British,” noted Bowie but the genie hadn’t heard him.
“If it were anyone but you, my old friend,” Raheem addressed Gossitch, “I would not accept this delivery.”
“I appreciate it, Rah. I really do.”
“I know you do, my friend.” A smile a mile wide spread across Raheem’s face. “You are sincere in your gratitude. I am djinn. I can detect this.”
“You can offload this stuff?” asked Santa Anna. “I mean, considering where it comes from and all…”
“There is always appetite to contend with, my friend. Those we feed know better than to inquire about the origination of the supply.”
“It’s like making sausage,” offered Jay.
The genie offered a mild oath in Farsi. “Please, you do not mention the filthy sow in my establishment.”
Jay quickly apologized.
I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) Page 5
