But a promise is a promise.
They follow the Mustang out of Dog Neck Harbor all the way past Fair Haven, where it pulls off 104A and parks behind a barn that has been converted into an auto garage across the street from silos. North Star. Nice name.
The driver has already gone into the garage when they pull around.
“Remember,” Georgi says, “he has long black hair like an Indian and he is thin.”
“Am I a man you must say things twice to?”
“Sorry.”
“Let me see your gun.”
Georgi looks around, then removes his snub-nosed .38.
Sergei takes it from him, opens the cylinder, spins it, his heart gladdening at the sight of brass. Shell casings are his favorite jewelry.
“This is ready. Try not to shoot me.”
He now pulls out his own Makarov, flips down the safety, puts it back into his coat.
They get out.
Open the door, walk in like they know what they’re doing. Sneaking is for idiots; people who look as though they have a purpose rarely get questioned.
They find themselves in a back room, an employee room of sorts, where a number of heavily tattooed Mexicans sit around a table littered with tequila bottles and half-eaten plates smeared with brown and green sauces.
The place smells like chocolate, cinnamon, and garlic.
Now a voice behind them.
Mexican accent.
“Keep your hands out of your pockets.”
They do.
“Why were you following me?”
“I like Mustangs,” Sergei says. “I was hoping that one might be for sale. Is it?”
Chancho grunts.
The men at the table look at the Russians with eyes like brown stone. Several of them have their hands ominously under the table.
“Why were you coming in the back door to talk about buying a car?”
“That’s the way you came in. We wanted to talk to you.”
Chancho grunts.
Gonzo walks in, sees guns, puts his hands over his eyes like the see-no-evil monkey and walks briskly out.
“Why the pistolas? You know, it’s not nice to bring guns to the back door to ask about buying a car.”
“Please,” Georgi starts.
Sergei says, in Russian, “If you beg I will shoot you myself.”
Then, in English, “This was our mistake. I apologize for disturbing you. With your permission, we will leave now and we will not return.”
“Give me your wallets,” Chancho says. “And put your guns on the table. Like slow, though. Super slow.”
They do.
Chancho looks in the wallets, grunts.
“Lotta money in these wallets. If I still stole I’d be real happy about these wallets.”
The Russians stay quiet.
“But I don’t steal, not no more,” he says. “Not money, anyway.”
He takes the driver’s licenses out of both wallets, gives the wallets back, always behind the Russians, and they do not look at him.
Now he tosses the driver’s licenses on the table. Georgi’s lands in pico de gallo.
“My cousins, they gonna keep those. They could be fake, but I don’t think so. If something bad happens to me, something real bad’s gonna happen to you. ¿Comprende, pendejos?”
“Ponymayu,” Sergei says, nodding.
The Mexicans walk them outside.
Chancho asks them to open the car doors.
They do.
Chancho pulls out a large, brutal-looking knife and cuts long slashes in the upholstery. He does this impassively, taking his time, like fucking up car seats is just another service they offer at North Star, like it’s something he wants to do well.
He motions for them to get back in their cars.
They do.
“Adios, pendejos. And don’t come back.”
Before the disgraced Volkswagen pulls out of the North Star Garage, Sergei Alexandrovich Rozhkov looks at Georgi.
“You let a woman tell you what to do, and this is what happens.”
“But . . .”
“Be quiet. Misha drowned. You’re an idiot. I’m going back to Brooklyn.”
66
Night.
A new moon, the sky and the lake beneath it as black as oil.
The woman stands naked atop the cabin, naked but for a canvas bag slung over her shoulder. She readies two bottles, vodka bottles now filled to the neck with blood.
One contains rooster’s blood.
One does not.
She takes a swig from that one, then empties both into a bucket from which a birch broom juts. She ties the empty bottles together and hangs them around her neck. She uses the broom to drizzle and flick the blood on her roof, knowing she’ll have flies tomorrow, but there’s nothing for it. This is how it’s done. She doesn’t have to coat the whole roof—there isn’t enough for that anyway—but she must not leave two handsbreadths unbloodied.
This is an old spell, and the old spells are particular.
She walks backward toward the ladder, walking the bucket with her, sweeping behind so she doesn’t get any on the bottoms of her feet. Every yard or so she rests the broom, takes hen feathers from her shoulder sack and sprinkles these on the roof, repeating a verse in Russian and concentrating on what she wants.
The bottles knock together tenderly sometimes, reminding her how testes, breasts, and ovaries—all the genitive organs—come in twos. Three is the number for gating, invocation, and killing. Four is for protection and weather. But two is for creation.
Two babes, a boy and a girl.
Two chickens, a rooster and a hen.
Down the ladder now, and she gives the Man Who Will Not Look At Her the bottles. He puts them in the garbage bag with the bones. The hen and rooster bones, and the bones that are not hen or rooster bones.
And the clothes.
The little clothes.
In the bag that will be rowed out to the lake.
She stands now on the porch watching the Cold Man row.
Moroz.
The Man Who Will Not Look At Her will not row—he will go back to his room hooded like a bird and sitting somewhere between sleep and waking. He learned quickly, hoods himself obediently, goes to town to run errands and never dares to run. Knows the Cold Man would come for him, and for his. He took to it so naturally because he is a coward. Not like the thief.
Things are beginning to move against the thief.
He is strong now, not like then.
He has killed the Baba in the woods, or caused her to be killed.
His bitch in the water killed sweet Misha.
His house is full of tricks.
He has friends, many friends.
First, the friends.
Then the fear will come to him, weaken him.
And then she will close his eyes.
Take back what is hers.
He hid himself, but that magic is waning.
She knows his town, even what road.
He has spread himself too thin with other spells.
She will find him soon.
Tonight’s magic must sleep, but it will awaken when the moon waxes fat and full.
“Wait a moment,” she says. “The potatoes.”
The Man Who Will Not Look At Her is tying up the bag, putting it in the boat. He hears her, says,
“Potatoes? Do you need potatoes?”
“Yes. That might be enough for him. You will go tomorrow and find me a bucket of potatoes. Other things, too.”
“Of course.”
“Are you hungry?”
He shakes his head, looking at his feet.
“You’ll have to eat.”
He shakes his head again.
A tear falls on his feet.
“Go to your kennel.”
He leaves, still looking down, his shoulders folded in on themselves.
She smells the air.
Smiles.
Garlic, rosemary, wine, black pepper.
And meat.
She salivates.
The first roast is done.
67
Andrew drives Salvador to the North Star Garage, where Radha’s car waits to be driven north to Chicago. Salvador will drive it in a day, needing neither rest nor sleep, looking to all but the very luminous like a handsome young Latino. And the very luminous will be used to seeing strange things; will not think much of seeing a portrait of Salvador Dalí swiveling in the window of a Mini Cooper, checking the blind spot twice as it changes lanes. He will return through Radha’s shower, perhaps in time for lunch tomorrow.
Chancho shows Andrew the final touch. Zebra skin seats. He had seen on her Facebook page her post about her new zebra-skin pillow, how much she liked that particular pelt.
She’s going to squee.
Chancho looks ashen, distracted.
“You still thinking about the Russians, Chanch?”
“Them? No. One was a pussy, the other didn’t care. Not enough to tangle with us. They ain’t comin’ back.”
Andrew is thinking about the Russians, though. He thinks it might be prudent to acquire a pendant that turns bullets, a lovely bit of sorcery made from Kevlar, lead, silver, armadillo blood, and the ground tooth of someone who died of natural causes, but the user who makes these lives in Rio de Janeiro and doesn’t care for tapes of the dead or cars.
What the Brazilian wants is a cloak of feathers that will change him into a hawk. Andrew could make such a cloak, but it would take him weeks, maybe months. Birds are hard, and this is not his specialty. The user in Brazil doesn’t know Andrew and has a reputation for being kind of a prick—very QPQ. Quid pro quo. Reputation is everything between users, so they tend to trust each other. Not bullet guy. QPQ. He wants payment upon delivery. And Andrew wants the protection pendant stat.
The best shapeshifter, the one who taught Andrew, lives near Québec; she could make the hawk cloak in days, probably has one or two ready for trade. He doesn’t know what she might want, other than a really mighty youth potion, and those are in high, high demand. She has asked for stone spells before, though. If so, back to Michael Rudnick, who is sequestered with Anneke until the full moon. Luckily, the Québécoise trusts other users, knows Andrew, and would be willing to wait. Unluckily, she’s old, very old-school, and doesn’t use the Internet. Thinks it’s evil. So he’ll have to call her on her landline. Again. She didn’t answer last night, but that’s not unusual; she shifts and spends days at a time as an animal. It’s widely thought she’s close to opting out permanently, rebooting into a young critter and spending her last years on earth flying or running on all fours.
There’s a man in the city who knows about birds and shapeshifting, but he’s old, too.
And he helped Andrew once before.
The kind of help you can’t pay back, and you can’t ask other favors after.
Back to Chancho and his ashen face.
“What’s wrong?”
“Saw something messed up this morning.”
“You’ve seen plenty of messed-up shit.”
“Not like this.”
“Not like what?”
“You wanna see?”
“No. Yes.”
They walk through the employee room. An AK-47 leans in the corner looking insouciant.
“State police brought it in; I’m supposed to clean it up. They took the muerto, left the deer. Effing big effer. Look at this pinché deer.”
First he’s looking at the car.
The crumpled, dirty mess of a car.
Now he looks at the beast stoppering the hole where the windshield should be.
It is an effing big effer of a pinché deer.
Two hundred twenty-five pounds or better. Fifteen points or more on the rack, if the rack were intact. But it’s not. It’s through the windshield of the Saturn that clearly also hit a tree. The stag is practically fused into the car.
“You can see where they had to cut the poor dude out on this side, cut part of the deer’s horns off, too, where they were through him. All the way through him. Look at this seat.”
Andrew suppresses the urge to gag.
“But this is what I don’t get . . .”
Now he points at a hole in the deer’s rear shoulder, another flowering out of the back of the neck.
“Bullets. Homeboy shot this deer. Probably through the glass, but the glass is gone. They took the gun, too. He had it in his hand. They asked for pliers to get it out, that’s how tight he had it.”
Andrew tries to process this.
“Yeah, I know. Messed up. But look at this . . .”
His strong, brown finger indicates a broken headlight, blood, fur.
“And this.”
Muddy hoofprints on the roof, scratches on the door.
“More than one deer,” I say.
“Yeah, and it’s the tree that crunched in the front end, not the deer. Not this deer.”
“He didn’t hit this deer?”
“Nah. He hit another deer. Wrecked his car. Then deer come along . . . Maybe more than one. Look . . . hoof-ding, hoof-ding. Coming out of the woods and going at the car, looks like. Then the big boy came like a cannonball, ran through the effin’ windshield so fast it broke it and put its horns through his heart. Even though he shot it, shot it good. Look.”
He points again at the lethal bullet wounds.
“This is brujo stuff, isn’t it?”
Andrew touches the car.
“Isn’t it?”
Andrew nods.
Brujo stuff of the first order.
Slavic forest magic.
And very, very strong.
Then it happens.
A young man appears, pale, speared by the deer, writhing in his seat. He wears aviator sunglasses; blood comes out of his mouth, makes bubbles every time he says the word please. He says it several times.
Chancho can’t see it, is still examining the hoof and antler gouges in the Saturn’s finish as if they were a rude hieroglyph that might explain how such things happened in the world.
The ghost starts to swell up.
Take it easy, Andrew thinks. I see you.
THEN HELP ME
The pallid young man puts the phantom of his gun in his mouth, pulls the trigger impotently, coughs blood all over the gun, and cries.
Help me
How?
It shivers. Points the gun at him. Spasms its fist as it pulls the trigger. Nothing happens, but it shoots Andrew several times, then Chancho, then itself.
Get Them.
Who?
Them, it wheezes.
Becomes frustrated that Andrew doesn’t understand, begins to get tired. New ghosts get tired easily.
It vomits black liquid all over itself and fades away.
The dead deer jerks, kicks.
Chancho jumps, crosses himself.
The stag deflates a little, lies very still, won’t move again.
Andrew rubs his temples.
“Headache?”
Andrew smiles, shakes his head, closes his eyes.
“I’m in trouble, Chancho. Bad trouble.”
Chancho nods.
“I told you not to eff with this stuff anymore. ¡Cabron!”
Chancho hammer-fists himself in the thigh, looks angrily at Andrew.
“This is from before, Chancho. From before I met you.”
“Yeah, but you’re still in it. Don’t you see? It’s why they can get to you, still. Get out of it.”
“It’s not like that.”
Chancho throws his arms up.
“No, it’s like this,” he says, indicating the wreck, the improbable deer, the bloody seat.
Andrew nods.
“I’ll stay away from you until this is over. After I help you clean this up. This isn’t your mess.”
“Nah, go home. You’ll get in the way. And don’t stay away after. Just quit with the books and the chingada brujerías.”
Andrew laughs a little, still rubbing his temples.
Looks at Chancho.
“I’ve noticed that you say very bad things in Spanish but not English. Why is that?”
Chancho pauses.
“Because I’m American now. Them other words are in my blood. I can’t help it. But I got to start over with American.”
“Ah,” the magus says, clearly unconvinced.
The bigger man walks over, encircles Andrew with a mighty arm.
“I’ll ask the boys to stay around,” Chancho says. “I’ll pray, too. Get some Jésus down here.”
If only.
Andrew doesn’t know if there is a Jésus, and, if there is, whether he was God or man.
If he was a man, though, he must have been a user.
Water into wine sounds really.
Fucking.
Good.
68
Early evening.
The doorbell rings.
As Salvador is engaged in the garden, Andrew opens the door himself to find Arthur Madden and Mrs. Simpson standing on his porch, Mr. Madden panting somewhat more than usual, Mrs. Simpson smiling broadly and holding a paper plate covered in tinfoil.
“Good evening, Mr. Blankenship,” she says, her massive, jacketed bosom forming a sort of brooched cliff. “Sorry to drop by so late. I hope we’re not disturbing you,”
She’s doing the talking so Arthur can catch his breath.
“Not at all.”
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