The Blue Blazes

by Chuck Wendig

  Correction: the Snakeface killer.

  Killer. Assassin. Like so many Snakefaces. Seducers of mind, body, soul.

  Life-eaters, all of them.

  Casimir was at that meeting.

  Mookie feels his fists ball up and he steps into the street – a coming taxi honks its horn at him and slams on the brakes, but Mookie doesn’t give a shit. As he passes, he punches out one of the cab’s headlights and keeps walking, bits of clear plastic falling off his knuckles.

  Suddenly the Lexus lurches forward, headlights flicking on – it zips out of the parking space into the street. It takes off, and Mookie gives stomping chase. Behind him, the cab driver is out of the car – a fat white guy with flabby jowls. He’s flailing his hands and yelling and pointing at the front of the car, but Mookie doesn’t care. He just skids to a halt, watching the red demon eyes of the Lexus taillights turn the corner at Park and disappear.

  “You better run,” he says. And if I find out that you had anything to do with Casimir’s murder, I’m going to punch you into a greasy pudding.

  Karyn’s isn’t called Karyn’s, though that’s how Mookie thinks of it. She calls her place “Mackie Messer’s” – but despite the name and how she looks it’s not particularly hip or upscale. It’s a butcher shop. Everything white. White counter, white floor. Glass case showing the cuts of the day. Couple meat scales. Grinders and other equipment in the back. Freezer, too. Basic stuff, but from that comes what Mookie considers to be the real magic: cuts of meat from heritage breeds of pig and cow, duck and chicken, some of which Karyn turns into charcuterie: sausage, salumi, lardo, pate, all crafted with an expert hand and an eerie patience. Karyn is cool like that.

  She’s so cool, in fact, that when Mookie calls her at 2:30 in the morning, she’s still awake. “Making a brine,” she says. And the good news is, she’s in the Chelsea shop, not in the bigger Park Slope venue.

  He asks her if he can stop by. She says yeah.

  He hates that he needs her for this, but he does.

  Subway, then. To Chelsea. To Mackie Messer’s.

  Karyn lets Mookie in. She’s a sight for sore eyes. White apron flecked with red hanging over a black bra. Pale skin inked with the sigils of a cook’s life: a skull with a knife in its teeth on the back of her neck, a garlic bulb on the left shoulder, a giant pig’s head with an apple in its mouth (and a worm poking out of the apple) covering the right shoulder all the way down to the bicep. Black punky hair in a red handkerchief.

  Lipstick the color of wet cherries.

  She’s beautiful to him. Not in that way. She’s gay as the day is blue – or as she puts it, “Queer as a three-dollar bill” – and he knows she’d never go for him. But she’s got power. Strength. Knowledge. A confidence mitigated by an uninterrupted calm. An even keel.

  “You’re my fuckin’ hero,” he says.

  “Hey, Mook.”

  They hug. He about crushes her. She gives as good as she gets.

  Into the back. She pulls up a metal stool. The smell here is killing him in the best way possible. The iron tang of blood. The sweet odor of raw pork. Spices, too: garlic and cumin, rosemary and sage. He can feel the hunger in his teeth.

  Bang. She drops a wooden cutting board in front of him.

  On it? Meat.

  She taps each as she tells him what it is: “Culatello with melon. Iberian chorizo from acorn-fed pigs. Cocoa nib and cayenne salami. And that last one that looks like an apostrophe, that’s smoked jowl roll. Fried up in a cast iron pan.”

  “You have a gift.”

  “No such thing. I love what I do and I do what I love.”

  He has no answer for that because he’s already plucking the chorizo from the plate and laying it on his tongue like a communion wafer. Even before his teeth cut the meat he tastes the oil coming off the sausage, oil that brings heat and spice.

  “Fuck,” he says, breathing out of his nose as he chews. Eyes closed.

  “Good, right?”

  “Good doesn’t begin to scratch the paint.”

  She blushes. “Anyway. How’s tricks, Mook?”

  “Shitty.” Here, then, the vibe of the confessional. She doesn’t know what he does. Not exactly. She doesn’t know what goes on beneath the streets of the city – and, sadly, often upon those streets. She’s one of the Blind – the scales of ignorance blissfully closing over her eyes. And good for her. Mookie wouldn’t wish the truth on someone like Karyn. Just the same, she lets him talk. He keeps it vague. She probably knows something’s up with him – thinks, correctly so, that he’s a made man in some way. The depths, however, remain hidden. “I got problems.”

  She pulls up a stool. Elbows down on the table, chin in a cradle of knuckles. “Talk while you eat.”

  “Work and family. Those two things…” He punches his two fists together. Sounds like two steaks slapping. “They’re crashing. Into one another.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “Getting ornery.”

  “Again?”

  “Again.”

  “You still in touch with her mother?”

  “Eh.” Translation: nope. “Been awhile. A long while. She doesn’t want nothin’ to do with me.”

  “Can’t she help get the girl under control?”

  “I dunno. Maybe.”

  “Worth a shot.”

  He thinks but does not say: it’s gone too far for that.

  But still – maybe Karyn’s onto something. Maybe Jess knows something about where Nora is. Or isn’t. Call her, you big dummy.

  “You’re a smart kid,” he says.

  “My father’s a clinical psychologist. My mother, a copyright lawyer. Two smarts don’t make a dumb.”

  “I’m a thug and my ex-wife used to be a night nurse at a drug clinic. What’s that tell you?”

  “Tells me you got trouble on your hands.” Karyn winks, nudges the cutting board closer. “Eat, you big bastard.”

  Eat. Yes. More heat. Cocoa nib and cayenne salumi. The round edges of unsweet chocolate. The fire from the pepper. The unctuous slightly-off taste of the meat.

  He makes a sound in the back of his throat. Kind of an nnnnggguuuuhhh.

  It’s time. He doesn’t want it to be, but it has to be.

  An attempt at a clumsy diversion: “You still dating, uhh, what’s her name?”

  “Lulu?”

  “Yeah. Lulu.”

  “Yeah. Louisa’s good, she’s good. Better than all the previous girls added up.”

  “The last one was a little crazy.”

  “The last five were a lot crazy. And Lulu’s crazy, too, but… hey, so am I. My crazy and her crazy play well together. Run with scissors down the hall.” She smiles. “She’s learning the trade. She might work here soon.”

  “That mean she’s giving up the… roller derby thing?”

  “She loves that too much. The Girls are her family.”

  The Girls. “Her gang.”

  Karyn’s face falls. “I know.” Now it’s her turn to change the subject. “You need to get yourself a girl, Mook.”

  “I’m too old for a girl. I need a woman.” He frees his palate with the culatello and melon. Soft mild fruit with what for many is the king of charcuterie – meat from the best part of the leg preserved in the pig’s emptied bladder and hung in a dark cool place for upwards of a whole year. Real-deal culatello hangs in musty old caves. Karyn hangs it in the basement of her Brooklyn joint, which is itself dark, dank, cavernous. The idea once struck Mookie that the Great Below would be a helluva place to hang meat – it wasn’t. The air has something wrong with it. The meat came out bulging with fungal pods like tumors. Smelled like sour, sun-warmed death.

  “Oh, hey, I got something you might wanna see,” Karyn says.

  She goes toward the back, grabs something from a metal table.

  She lays it down in front of Mookie.

  It’s a cleaver. Inside a brown leather sheath.

  He grabs it. Holds it. Likes its weight. The carving blade fit
s inside the sheath snug as anything – it slides in like a hand inside a pocket. A dark wooden handle with two inlaid brass stars encompassing the heavy pins affixing it to the blade. The handle is long. “It fits me,” he says. The wood, polished to a gleam. Mookie draws it from the sheath.

  The blade is bigger than a hardback book and almost as thick at the back – perfect for smashing garlic or, in Mookie’s world, cracking heads. The blade itself is serrated, not on purpose but through what must be years of use – the edge a crass line of crooked razor teeth. But when Mookie slides his thumb across it, he sees how sharp it is just the same. The flesh parts like soft whitefish and a bead of dark blood draws to the surface.

  He wipes it on his shirt.

  “Classy,” she tells him.

  He gestures to her apron with his chin. “Hey, we’re used to blood.”

  “You’re maybe used to a different kind of blood.”

  A cold moment between them. Her eyes flick away from him. Is that fear there? She knows who he is. Maybe some of what he does.

  But she pulls away from it, says, “That cleaver does me right. Not just for tenderloin or chicken bones. That’ll get me through the skull of a bison if I want it to.”

  “Yeah, nice, nice.” It fits like it belongs to him already. “What do you want for it?”

  “Cost me fifty, so I’ll take fifty.”

  “I’ll pay more.”

  “Nah. Just next time you come into the city, bring me some of what you been making lately. Hook a lady up.”

  “Man, I’ve been busy.” He folds a trio of twenties, hopes she doesn’t notice as he slides the folded bills toward her. “Made some lardo I’m pretty proud of. Nowhere near like what you’re bringing to the table. But it’s… OK.”

  “Like I said. Bring some in next time you come.”

  “That’s like a four-year-old bringing in his fingerpainting to, uhh, ahhh–” He tries to think of some kind of masterpiece painter, but nothing’s coming to mind. “One of those old artist guys. But yeah. I will. Just so you can tell me what I’m doin’ wrong.” He stands. It’s time. Get it over with. “I got a favor to ask.”

  “Favor. OK. Anything.”

  “I need to talk to Lulu.”

  Karyn bristles. She takes a step back.

  “What? Why?”

  “I…” He doesn’t want to say too much. Karyn can’t know. Can’t get drawn in. “I just got some questions to ask her.”

  “That sounds bad.”

  “It ain’t. It’s fine. Please.”

  “I’m not…” She takes a deep breath. “I can’t. Your world. Her world…”

  “I’m not gonna hurt her.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “You know me.”

  “Do I?” She laughs. “You come in here, I offer you food and cut you a deal on that cleaver – I think it’s a Richter Brothers cleaver if you care – and, and, and most of the time we just shoot the shit like two friends catching up on the day’s… the day’s whatever. But I know who you work for. I’m not stupid. And now you’re asking me about my girl? My girl who belongs to a gang? I won’t. OK? I won’t.”

  “Karyn, c’mon, this is important–”

  “You need to go.”

  He thinks for a half-a-second: I could make her talk.

  That’s what he does. Makes people hurt. Sometimes so they spill.

  He’s good at it.

  It’s a horrible thought. And he can’t do that. Not to her.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

  “Good.”

  “Thanks for…” He doesn’t even have to say.

  “Get out.”

  10

  Man will never colonize the Great Below. It is too wild. Too unreal. The chthonian labyrinth is a place of madness and I have seen it warp the mind of man the way a long damp warps a wooden beam. I myself have become twisted by the space but never enough to fool myself into thinking that we can or should stake a claim here. Yes, the Great Below has its villages and outposts – the marketplace of Yonder, the rat’s nest of addicts and madmen in the Freedom Tunnel, the temple of the People of the Turning Worm, the living graveyard of Daisypusher. And, of course, they have colonized us: the denizens of the Great Below have carved out territory in the Infinite Above – warehouses and nightclubs, restaurants and abandoned houses. The Chinatown block between Mott and Elizabeth is a known haven for starry-eyed monstrosities who care little for the Great Below and who hope to give it a go in the world above. Were you to ask me, I’d again reiterate that man will never properly colonize the Great Below. But give the monsters half a chance and they will most certainly colonize us.

  – from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

  They’re gonna kill her.

  That thought keeps running laps through his head. They’re gonna find her. They’re gonna kill her. Because of what she did. Or what they say she did.

  Mookie needs to find her, but he’s going nowhere fast. Karyn wouldn’t give up her girl. He shoulda known. Shouldn’t have even asked her to do that, and now here he is, heading to deal with the Devil to see if he can’t get a lead on his babygirl.

  Shit. Shit.

  He comes up out of the subway on Canal Street. Heads into Chinatown. Three-thirty in the morning. The Blazes are no longer a warm fire but a cigarette burn at the edges of everything, sizzling and searing him with a nicotine char.

  Which means he’s gotta get in quick, get out quick. Doesn’t want to go in blind. And he knows that dipping into the Cerulean again so fast before he’s had a chance to sleep could be trouble. (But here a little hungry monkey in the back of his brain screeches and hoots and rattles the bars of its cage, desperate to feed, feed, feed.)

  Mookie hoofs it. Heads toward Mott and Elizabeth, where Elizabeth ends at Bayard – that last block, deep in the heart of Chinatown, that’s where some of the monsters are. Monsters who play nice – or, nicer, at least – with the people above ground. You got Lei-Lei, the half-and-half mer-girl who runs a killer dim sum joint from her tank of ocean water in the back room. Across the street on the Elizabeth side is an antiquities shop run by another halfsie – actually a pair of them: conjoined twins, Jim and Judy, both white and blonde as the sand on a Florida beach. You look at them with a Blind eye, you don’t see them conjoined – you just see a brother and sister who always stand shoulder-to-shoulder. You go in Blazing and you see the way the flesh reaches out like gooey bread-dough, her ropy flesh intertwining with his, both of them looking like each is melting into the other.

  They sell tschotschkes to the tourists – lucky kitty clocks and Buddha statues and the like – but to those in the know, they sell artifacts found down in the deep. Strange rocks. Gobbo weapons. Above-world items dragged into the depths and infused with the magic of the Underworld, sucking it up like a kid with a straw.

  It’s not them that Mookie wants to talk to. Not tonight.

  He wants to talk to Mr Smiley.

  Smiley’s a Snakeface. Runs a “teahouse and cocktail bar” at the corner. Also runs a whole stable of prostitutes. And buckets of drugs. And guns.

  And, most important of all, information.

  On the way, Mookie grabs his cell. Thinks to dial Jess, his ex. Nora’s mother. It’s too late – er, early? – to call. Right? He’s suddenly not sure. Nora’s in danger. He knows that much. And if Jess knows anything…

  Then again, Mookie’s the last person Jess wants to be talking to. Particularly at asshole-o’clock in the morning. That’s all it is. It’s late. Right?

  He quickly pockets the phone.

  Mookie spies the alley between the Xinhua fish market and the Golden Sun dry cleaners, ducks into the shadow between the two buildings. Back here, it smells like old fish and cleaning solution – soap and seafood in troubling combination. Mookie pushes past it, past a couple rust-eaten dumpsters, feet splashing in old puddles–

  A figure steps out in front of him. Twenty feet away. Rises up from b
ehind a small mound of black trash bags. Rats scatter.

  It takes a second for Mookie’s eyes to adjust – but he sees the skinny, lanky frame and what at first looks like a square head. But the head isn’t square: it’s just the brown paper bag over the head. A bag painted with a Jack-o-Lantern mask, the orange pumpkin with the triangle eyes cut out, the jagged mouth, too.

  Jack-o-Lantern mask.

  That means it’s one of the Lantern Jacks.

  They’re one of the city’s old-school gangs. New York isn’t like other cities. The big gangs – M13, Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, Triads – aren’t here. The Organization rose up in the 1970s, made friends with the gangs that existed at that time: the Black Aces, the Black Sleeves, the Battery Park Bruisers, the Railroaders, the Majestic Immortals, the Sinner Kids, and of course the Get-Em-Girls and the Lantern Jacks. The bigger gangs never got to make a foothold because the smaller ones made a deal with the Organization – a deal that let them survive here long as they kept to the truce. Each has territory. Each does their thing.

  In theory.

  Chinatown belongs to the Lantern Jacks. Used to be Majestic Immortal territory but those dumb fuckers imploded about ten years back – of all things, it was family that set them on a course for self-destruction. Head of the gang, Big Chang, was married to this ball-buster, Lirong. Chang got around: had a thing for some dominatrix named Orchid on the Upper East Side. Lirong got tired of it, fucked Big Chang’s brother, Little Chang. Big found out. The Chang brothers got into a very public pissing match, broke the gang in two, huge fight in the street – and Lirong was the one who ended it all. Walked into the fray, shot both of them, then walked back out. Never seen again. Gang fell apart. Lantern Jacks – white boys, not Chinese – strolled in with their pumpkin masks and their scarecrow rags, took the place over.

  And now one of them stands before Mookie.

  He hears footsteps behind him.

  More creeping in. He glances over his shoulder, sees three of ’em back there. One of them has a thick chain ill-concealed behind his leg, the end of it draped on the ground like the head of a dead python.