Half-Resurrection Blues_ A Bone Street Rumba Novel - Daniel Jose Older Page 0,34

find his way back to the house his wife and teenage kids still live in.

And he’ll wallow.

I can’t judge him for it. The very thought of a family is so foreign to me—I couldn’t even begin to imagine what emotions he’s having. But this is no time to wallow. There’s too much at stake right now, and Dro has been unsteadier than I’ve ever seen him. He seemed all right at the bar the other day, but this . . . this can’t be good.

The house sits on a pleasant residential block in Flushing. It’s a simple two-story type deal, pretty much identical to all the others around it. Dro’s hovering outside the kitchen window, and I can feel his poor dead heart disintegrating from across the street. Inside, his wife, Ginny, is taking dinner out of the oven, and Beatrice, now almost seventeen and finally leaving behind the gawky preteen look, sets the table. Delroy is in the living room doing homework. It’s so simple, and I’m pretty sure that’s what makes it so hard. In the thick of things, it’s easy to get caught up and ignore that somewhere there’s people having a normal life, day in day out, that you were once a part of. Then it slows down. Your mind has time to catch up and fuck with you and there you are, levitating outside the window of a house that once was yours, watching a family to whom you’re only a memory and a picture on the mantel.

I walk up next to Dro, careful not to make any noise whatsoever, and stand there with him for a few minutes, watching.

“Riley sent you.”

“Mm-hmm. Sent word with this slow-ass little courier ghost.”

“Oh, Elton?” A smile creeps over Dro’s face, but his eyes are oceans of sadness.

“That’s the guy. He’s a little procedure maven, that one.”

“He is.” Dro hasn’t taken his eyes off his family, and I wonder if he’s going to go easily or make a fuss. The last time this happened, he stayed for a full day, but it was a less drastic time and we didn’t really need him around, so Riley and I agreed to just wait it out.

“I’m coming,” he says. Probably wasn’t hard to guess what I was thinking. “I’m done here.”

It’s a little too easy, and I almost ask if he’s sure. But that would be counterproductive. “Okay.” When he doesn’t move for another full minute, I take the initiative and step backward, very quietly, away from the window. Dro’s shoulders hunch over, and for a second I think he’s sobbing. His glow flickers, then strengthens. Some invisible act of regeneration has just happened, and it was probably too personal to let me see, but part of me wishes I could’ve. It’s a whole other kind of sorcery—pulling the pieces of a shattered heart back together, and it’s one I know nothing about. When he turns around, Dro looks fine. Okay, his eyes are still sad, but his half smile is real. “Let’s go,” he says softly. “Now.”

There’s a little urgency in his voice, like if we don’t leave this very second he may be trapped there eternally, so I fast-walk out of the driveway and we head down the quiet block as the darkness grows around us.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Riley greets me with a curt nod and hands me a blade, handle out.

My eyes widen. “Y’all got it back?”

“Recovery team went in after things calmed down, before PD and EMS swarmed the place. The ngk was still there, so they moved fast. Guess the dude just dropped it, but it’s clean.”

I nod. Sheathe it in my cane. It feels good in my hand, an old friend.

Riley looks at Dro. “You good, bro?”

Dro smiles, says he is, and we settle around the paper-strewn table. “All right, guys,” Riley says. “I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise that another ngk has shown up.” He points to a new dot on the map. “This one is closer to St. John’s and still fits within the overall pattern that Carlos and I were working out yesterday. Still wraps around the central location where we’re sitting right now, unfortunately. But I want to try something new.”

“You have a plan?” Dro asks.

“Of sorts. Well, something I want to try anyway. Was talking it over with some of the big heads upstairs. They want us to check into the possibility of disabling the ngks, since we can’t kill them.”

I immediately don’t like this idea. “You want us to